“Leslie Ebert: Light Portraits”
essay by Richard Speer
Copyright 2018
Lyrical and enigmatic, Leslie Ebert’s abstract works on aluminum panel enchant the eye and engage the imagination. The Portland, Oregon-based artist creates vignettes of dazzling light, rendered in macro photography and sublimation dyes on metal, a presentation that complements the luminosity of the subject matter. The images are at once abstract and highly individual, like light itself. Ebert finds and accentuates the personality of specific light-play. In a sense she is a portraitist of light, illuminating illumination itself as it clusters, beads, scatters, striates, refracts, and vibrates. She captures and interprets unrepeatable moments in light’s narrative trajectory, using a digital camera as a kind of postmodern divining rod as she searches for the creatures of the light through her viewfinder on its macro setting, coaxing them to appear and express themselves.
Much of what she records cannot be seen with the naked eye; some of the light-play resembles the mysterious emanations once known as “spirit orbs.” They seem to trust Ebert, to know she will depict them with the graciousness and nuance they deserve. She has earned that trust with her perfectionist technique and a sophisticated sense of composition that flows from her background in architecture and printmaking. Ebert does not simply photograph light; she collaborates with it. She knows it is not monolithic but infinitely varied throughout the day, the season, the locale. While she created many of her signature images in foreign lands—Bali, Croatia, Italy, Mexico—others are from closer to home in Oregon and Washington. The light in her Other People’s Junk series glints off the surfaces of seemingly mundane objects sourced from garage sales. Light does not arrange itself according to our hierarchies. Sometimes a transfixing image appears when the sun sits low on a crystalline winter afternoon. Other times it shows up in a hotel bathroom appointed with a garish fluorescent bulb. There is a line in the Madonna song “Vogue”: “Beauty’s where you find it.” Ebert finds it in the sacred, profane, profound, routine.
Light has a mind and will of its own. It is apt that this artist is fascinated by particle physics, a level at which light appears to exercise volition. The rationales for that volition may be inscrutable to us but could well be self-evident to light’s own consciousness. Who can say why given objects present such varied luminosities? Perhaps because of where they have been, what residual energies they have caught in their web of wave and particle, who has touched them and when and why. This is where Ebert’s work departs from formalist concerns, from its ties to the lineages of Abstract Expressionism and minimalism, and begins to enter realms of the unspoken and unspeakable. Light has always lived at the intersection of the scientific and the mystical. It has always moved us—in the majesty of a sunrise or the flickering of a torch on a cave wall—but perhaps it is also communicating with us. And by contemplating it through Ebert’s process and vision, we the viewer may be able to discern something about light that we could not otherwise have seen.
The results of these dialogues with light bedazzle and delight, glimmer and shimmer and gleam. Suspended in luscious color, pellucid, opalescent, the images come forth and recede in a Hans Hofmann-like push/pull between foreground and background. They suggest geometries, shadows, nebulae, phosphenes on the inside of closed eyes. Some of them dance and dart with a nimbleness that suggests mischief or whimsy. Across the spectrum, they evoke our memories, both personal and collective. In these sumptuous visual poems, Leslie Ebert offers a key to unlocking some measure of light’s timeless allure. With patience and attentiveness, she listens to its particularities of syntax and invites it to speak to us of its journeys through time and space.
—Richard Speer is an author, art critic, and curator based in Portland, Oregon. His reviews and essays have appeared in ARTnews, Art Ltd., Visual Art Source, Artpulse, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian, Willamette Week, Salon, and Newsweek.
