LeeAnna Repass lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a graduate of the Atlanta College of Art, and has an exhibition list that features a decade of Solo Shows and Inclusion in museum exhibitions across the Southeast. She also specializes in acrobatic movement, with forays into archaic needlework, and the slow resurrection of an antique house.
Artist Statement
My work examines how shared patterning, vast fragility, in-between states, and the effects of time come together to provide both comfort and a glance at hopelessness, when faced with the intricacies of nature and our human embodiment.
Through pastel on paper drawings of water surfaces, I process concepts of intermediate spaces as they relate to the experience of psychological and physical fluctuations, reaching for wholeness in the face of entropy, and the relentlessness of time. These ideas are the motivation behind approaching my images through a highly detailed, and large scale approach, resulting in a kind of representationalism that reaches toward a sublime abstraction. In depicting these surfaces, derived from such brief yet intricate moments in time, I aim to emphasize the urgency of both reverence for consciousness, and the futile urge to adhere to passing moments.
These renderings of water in a state of halted momentum are also about an ache for stillness, or the desire to find a place outside of time and its effects. They are in part motivated by a reach for an infinitely unchanging home, that possibly existed before the experience of individuality. I imagine that the Bardo-like state between shifts in trajectory is one that mirrors this place of hovering peace constantly reached for while caught in the unstoppable narrative of ego and time.
I meditate on shared patterning and the ultimate fragility within all systems through a series of graphite drawings. A set of these drawings addresses how a dandelion begins to resemble enormous star formations when presented on a larger scale. What I want to suggest through drawing this object magnified, is that the drawn object and the larger systemic formations it resembles are equally fragile and intricate. A dandelion head exists on the verge of instability, easily blown apart by a breath. This dissolution is essential for new growth, since destroying the object releases its seeds. The star follows the same pattern. Giant stars collapse and disperse, while the remnants of gas and dust become cosmic seeds. In producing these drawings, I hope to emphasize the enormity found within small entities, both in terms of moments, and nature’s minutia. In another group of works in the same media, I fuse elements of this natural minutia to themselves in ways that imply interconnectedness and reciprocal defeat. My aim is to imply emotional recognition of the space between the expansiveness of biology and the limitations of mortality.
