Leah Aegerter Exhibition at the Beasley Gallery
Details
Leah Aegerter, “The Body of the Earth”
Exhibition at the Beasley Gallery, NAU School of Art+Design
Sept. 12–Nov. 1, 2024
Opening Reception Sept. 12, 5-7 p.m.
About Leah Aegerter
My sculptures are abstract portraits of moments I capture and experience in the landscape. I am attracted to rocks as genderless entities whose transformative nature codes them with life, and I explore what it means to be physically and emotionally intimate with them. As I travel through the natural world, I document my surroundings through 3D scanning, and then use digital fabrication techniques to reproduce the geological surfaces in new materials. In doing so, I aim to honor the history of the original form as well as the digital transformation as I catalog the moments my body and being meld with the world.
Rocks hold billions of years of history: history of water coursing through the landscape and eroding geological surfaces into unique textures; history of flora and fauna inhabiting vastly different landscapes than we see today; history of prolonged tectonic collision and fracture. My sculptures help me confront what it means to be a human in this current landscape, this current moment of geological history. They are physical manifestations of observed textures, feelings, and occurrences in the natural world.
“The Body of the Earth” Exhibition Description
Energy pulses through me. It is more than the tiny heartbeat you feel in your finger after a cut. It is more than the rhythmic flow of blood through veins. My body is a slow river, and waves of feeling lap against the shore of skin that confines it. This is the energy of the canyon syncing with my own internal reserve. One small body walks into the folds of one big body: this is communion.
I am more aware of myself than I have ever been. Each subtle movement articulates the joinery of my skeleton, yet I sense that a body is more than this. In my heightened feeling, I understand that my little life, gliding along this sandy wash, is here to witness something beyond the visual. These walls are not rock, they are skin. This creek is not water, it is blood. This Earth is not dormant, it is sentient. In The Body of the Earth, Leah Aegerter exhibits sculptures made over the past two years about Grand Canyon and its animate forces. This body of work, which began while the artist was residence at the Grand Canyon Conservancy in 2022, catalogues her journey in acknowledging the Earth as a sentient collaborator in both societal advancement and individual growth. Geology documents the histories and impressions of its countless life cycles. In an exchange of knowledge with the land, Aegerter responds by fossilizing her own moments of the physical and emotional human experience into tactile geological representations.