From Tibetan Buddhism and Tarot cards to animal videos and advertising, trans New York painter Leidy Churchman calls upon a diverse range of subjects in a quest to explore consciousness and expand the knowable universe.
Read MoreBorn in Villanova, Pennsylvania, Churchman studied for a BA and MA at Hampshire College, graduating in 2002. As an undergraduate, Churchman began collaborating with New York-based queer feminist art collective LTTR and contributed drawings to their journal, later joining them in various performative actions into the mid-2000s. Among Churchman's LTTR compatriots and friends at the time were K8 Hardy, Every Ocean Hughes (then Emily Roysdon), Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Ulrike Müller, Lanka Tattersall, and Lusi Jacobs.
In 2010, Churchman completed an MFA at Columbia University, followed by a two-year artist residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. At this time, the artist focused on video art and making the large-scale floor paintings that would serve as sets for various video works and performances. It was only in 2013 that Churchman returned consistently to the easel-painting seen in their seminal works.
Leidy Churchman's figurative and abstract paintings are heavily informed by the artist's experiences and challenges as a transgender individual and student of Buddhism, while also being influenced by the work of modern painters like Henri Rousseau, Marsden Hartley, and Chaim Soutine.
Churchman's small painting Narcissistic Rat (2013) was first exhibited in 2015 and later renamed Basically Good in 2017. This creative gestation period is not uncommon for some of the artist's works, which conceptually develop over time.
In the painting, a hairy-tailed rat perches just above the water, looking down at its distorted, more mouse-like reflection. Appearing vexed by its mirrored self beyond the uncrossable divide, the rat serves to explore deeper themes of self-identity and perception. Replacing direct allusion to the myth of Narcissus with the more neutral rat, Basically Good reassures us that it does not truly matter what species, gender, or shape one sees in the mirror.
Animals are a common subject of Churchman's paintings. Churchman's Crocodile (2016), originally conceived in 2013, presents an internet-sourced image of a crocodile walking into water. Churchman found conceptual inspiration for this work in the 'stunning sense of immersion, of going into the world—farther.'
In Giraffe Birth (2017), the artist references an image taken from a Buzzfeed post titled 'Tour Operator Captures Incredible Pictures of Baby Giraffe Being Born', a familiar internet listicle phenomenon. Churchman isolates the first image of the unusually stoic giraffe standing with the amniotic sac and a pair of legs just emerging. In a play on presence and emptiness, the pale part of the giraffe's coat are bare canvas.
Churchman pays overt homage to a diverse slate of artists in several works, all of them personal in some form. Among them, Rousseau (2015) presents a Rousseau-like animal-inhabited landscape; The Piers Untitled by Emily Roysdon (2016) pays homage to LTTR compatriot Every Ocean Hughes; Kruger (2017) renders Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Seeing through you) (2004) in oil on linen; and New Dawn Marsden Hartley Soutine (2014) recreates the titular Maine-based queer artist's painting Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy (1940). Churchman's Hartley rendition is notably accentuated in its erotic charge, expressed in red paint with chalky-white streaks and with an image that seemingly escapes from the frame.
Churchman's 32-foot-long floor painting Don't Try to Be the Fastest (Runway Bardo) (2019) presents an amorphous collage of imagery on a pulsating red ground. Incorporated images include stills from the 1982 film E.T., the Buddhist Lojong slogan 'Abandon Any Hope of Fruition', NASA's iconic black hole photo, a Vogue magazine cover, a skunk mid-spray, trans rights posters, and paintings by René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico.
Buddhism, which Churchman began practising around 2013, is a favourite theme, particularly in works since 2020. In the series 'The Between is Ringing' (2020), the artist makes a departure from found imagery, dipping into more abstract representation in several of the works. Its name, an old Taoist saying, connects with Buddhist notions of non-duality and non-separateness.
Within the paintings, Churchman leaves room for what is unknown or unresolved, the in-between. Subtle resonations can also be found across the series' works, evocative of unexpected thoughts, memories, and emotions that can arise. The small orange dots on burgundy red in The Between is Ringing (Sparkling Bruised) (2020), for instance, are transformed into tiny seeds on plump fruit in The Between is Ringing (Strawberry) (Braiding Sweetgrass) (2020).
Leidy Churchman has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Europe, including participation in the milestone 80th edition of the esteemed Whitney Biennial.
Solo exhibitions include FOCUS, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2021); Crocodile, Hessel Museum of Art and CCS at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2019); Free Delivery, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2017); Lazy River, Boston University Art Gallery (BUAG), Boston (2013).
Group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Lose Enden, Kunsthalle Bern (2021); One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017); Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015); Abandon The Parents, The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2014); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2010).
Churchman's Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
