Leslie Hickey (b. 1983) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She earned BA degrees in Studio Art and English from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Recent solo exhibitions include The Future Has an Ancient Heart (Edel Extra, Nuremberg, Germany, 2018) and Beyond the Sea (Jules Maidoff Gallery at Studio Arts College International, Florence, Italy, 2014). Group exhibitions include Rumors (Wolff Gallery, Portland, OR, 2019), Let’s try listening again (A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2019), Some Other Place (Palazzo dei Cartelloni Gallery, SACI, Florence, Italy, 2018), and We’re Always Touching By Underground Wires (Pushdot, Portland, OR, 2018). In 2017 she was awarded a fellowship through The Civita Institute in Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy, and received funding through the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) in the same year with both a Professional Development Grant and a Project Grant (jointly awarded with Small Talk Collective). In 2018 she received an Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity Grant. She is a founding member of both Small Talk and SCALENO, an international photographic collective. Her images can be found in print in Issue 5 of Big Big Wednesday. Additionally, she is the proprietor of a letterpress, Hoarfrost Press.
The Future Has an Ancient Heart
“The future has an ancient heart”
Carlo Levi
Here, in Italy, there’s always a stepping backward, and an inching forward. The past is heavy, “pesante,” evident in the shape of buildings and the construction of walls; discovered in a dusty library in a remote hill town. The past collides with the present in olive orchards and a tattered lamp illuminating a nearby fresco.
I started to photograph what I found: places, people, objects, and scenes. In looking, I realized my language, photographing visual verbs, nouns, and articles in the world – always searching for the thing, the part, that would explain the whole. An optical lexicon, I collected this assortment of images, driven by a desire to describe, and a desire, also, to keep. Because I cannot keep a mountainside or a frescoed wall, I photograph them instead.
These photographs represent the culmination of eleven months of living and working in Italy, between 2014 and 2018.
To view more of Leslie Hickey’s work please visit her website.