Leah Edelman-Brier is a visual artist using the medium of photography. She holds an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University. She was a 2016 recipient of the McKnight Fellowship Grant. Her work has been shown in several group shows across the United States. Leah has been the featured artist in Juxtapoz Magazine, iGnant, and Fotografia art blogs. She has published in a number of European periodicals, most recently Auslöser Magazine. Leah aims to disrupt beauty ideals by using themes of desire, fertility, family, and metamorphosis to question the female experience. She was born and raised in Providence, RI and is currently living and working in Saint Paul, MN.
Body Becoming
‘Body Becoming’ intensifies the space between generations to questions the mother-daughter relationship presented in these images. The images aim to construct beauty out of what appears outwardly grotesque while questioning the resilience of the body. The attributes and flaws set in flesh and blood. On one side, the series embraces the abject and the ugly; it creates a subjectivity that humanizes the decay of aging. On the other side, it explores the magnificence of desire and tenderness with rawness and power.
‘Body Becoming’ mixes notions of genetic lineage, aging, and the lack of control presented by destiny to create an underscored anxiety of the inevitable presented by life and death. The images reveal the similarities in shape and size that the related human bodies take on. Working against such genetics is like waging a war on nature.
Witnessing this fluctuation of becoming and unbecoming within the work is like watching a fruit ripen past the point of consumption. Seduction and desire collide with the abject here. It creates a convoluted space where the viewer is drawn to the abject and unflinchingly senses its sexuality. Tension is created when the desirable does not align with beauty, leaving the viewers to question their feelings towards both. The series pushes normative perceptions of fertility, illness, and the presentation of feminine beauty to a place where those lines are blurred– where the decay is just as beautiful as youth.
To view more of Leah Edelman-Brier’s work please visit her website.