ARTIST STATEMENT

The act of sensing our surroundings has long become subconscious. Our conscious selves immediately perceive, defining, categorizing, and prioritizing what we see. Wild animals and infants, however, having not learned this behavior, first assess their environment as a world without boundaries, equalizing all players in an interconnected present. It is only after actively engaging in their environment that these creatures sculpt their sensations into perceptions. Thus, my search is for an empathetic presence, where the players – be they components of a photo or objects in a space – encourage a pre-perceived, interconnected perspective.

The “integrated photos” visualize what it might feel like to experience this through two dimensions. To begin, I secure a frame stretched with clear acetate in a chosen location. I then improvise a composition on and around the acetate by responding instinctively to the site’s properties through painting, drawing, and material. Once complete, I take a photo from my perspective, aligning the marks on the film with the fore- and background. The resulting hybrid photographs conflate the space, depicting an equalized moment between added marks, environment, and vantage point. As this work is compiled outside, in-studio creations turn these photos into research, using them to construct drawings that mask out everything from the photo except the original natural environment, collages made from the on-site detritus, and composite installations that synthesize findings of all three prior media.

Outside of this process, I also create site-contingent installation. For this work, I research a location by “sketching” with video, drawing, and photography. Once learned, I design an installation that emphasizes chosen idiosyncrasies of the site, paying particular mind to how they affect and are affected by a viewer’s presence. This involves editing certain structural elements via lighting adjustments, faux architecture, audio and video additions, etc., yielding perspectival shifts and abstractions of one’s sense of place that redirect a viewer’s attention. In these installations, equalization is experienced physically by heightening the viewer’s awareness of his/her corporeal intersection with the site’s highlighted properties.

Whether presented to the viewer two-dimensionally or experienced firsthand, the work resolves a location into shapes, lines, colors, textures, and patterns, disintegrating perceived boundaries and uncovering conversations about how a location’s sensorial fingerprint makes one site – and the effect it has on our own bodies – different from the next.

BIOGRAPHY

Rita Leduc: (b. 1985) Heralding from rural NJ, Leduc utilizes both two and three dimensions in her work, collaborating with chosen locations in search of a site’s sensorial fingerprint. Her work was most recently shown in To the Waters and the Wild, a solo exhibition created as Scholar-in-Residence at Wells College, and in two installations in Brooklyn: “CLOSET,” at This Friday or Next Friday, and “Push / Pull” at Public Address. Leduc received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and BA from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently teaches at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Rutgers University and is Creator and Co-Founder of GROUNDWORK, an interdisciplinary creative retreat.