Leah Gilliam - Art

Art

"Leah Gilliam's work examines how knowledge is produced and coded and how the conscious reorientation of cultural texts challenges their implications and constructions. In practice, she appropriates texts and uses them as a springboard to interpret larger issues of race, gender and sexual orientation."

Gilliam's work often focuses on technology and obsolescence. This preoccupation surfaces in many of her works. Her contributions to the "BitStreams" digital show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2001 were ancient Mac computers displaying fragments of old Super-8 movie trailers. Her 1998 CD-ROM Split: Whiteness, Retrofuturism, Omega Man worked with an 8 mm film trailer for Planet of the Apes and was described as a work that "obsessively looks back at outmoded media technologies." Another piece dealing heavily with the ideas of obsolescence, technology, and the reorientation of cultural texts, Gilliam's work Agenda for a Landscape received a great deal of attention during its stay from July 12 through September 22, 2002 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.