Leia Genis: As Her Body Sways | In Collaboration with Erin Jane Nelson

Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Leia Genis: As Her Body Sways as part of our current exhibition In Unity, as in Division.

Leia Genis utilizes and manipulates the cyanotype photographic technique, employing multiple exposures to layer and distort human silhouettes in space. She uses methods like wax-resistant dyeing and unraveling to recolor and abstract forms. Her work embodies the tensions between preservation, and erasure, often resulting in confusion, aligning with contemporary efforts to construct alternative histories and amplify marginalized voices.

As Her Body Sways is accompanied by a corresponding essay by Erin Jane Nelson, a fellow artist and writer currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia.

It’s Spring of 2020 and Leia Genis is standing in the sun, a sheet of linen dampened with light sensitive emulsion lays in the grass in front of her. She closes her eyes against the blazing light and breathes, quieting her mind for the roughly five minutes it will take for the exposure to burn into the fabric. As her body sways, the edges of the image wisp and blur. Since that initial experiment, she has continued to make camera-less images, expanding and morphing the limits of a photogram to its frayed edges. From the beginning, her cyanotypes have depicted bodies, sometimes rendered in a sharp outline of a hip and torso, sometimes fragmented by other silhouettes, always morphing and shifting and blurring in some part of the form. Several months after making those first cyanotypes with her own body, Genis began hormone replacement therapy, thus kicking off an ever evolving journey to medically affirm her gender.

As her own body entered this evolving state of “becoming,” she stepped out of the frame, opting for mannequins in lieu of living, breathing human forms. Practically, this shift allowed her to make longer, more complex exposures. Symbolically, the use of plastic, idealized bodies evokes the nearly universal experience of women: one’s body is always irrevocably tethered to a cultural ideal, moving towards or away from it. This experience may be especially true for many trans women, who—like Genis—can undergo years of hormonally and medically assisted transition, working towards a sense of gender affirmation that is often deeply personal and ever-changing.

After days of exposing, dyeing, stripping, re-exposing, Genis then works to push the images beyond a singular frame, further reinforcing the sense of traveling from one body to the next, or the stretching of boundaries between different bodies, different selves. The final works read as ghostlike, fluid timelines. Streaked with light stains reminiscent of the harsh afternoon sun coming through window blinds, the forms seem to declare that they are on the other side of the window, they are inside the house, they are in a space beyond, in a space of abstraction. Always haunting the edge of our consciousness, but existing in the twilight realm of desire, of hope, of yearning to fully become ourselves. 

Within Genis’ cyanotypes, these stand-in bodies obscure and confuse each other’s edges, foreclosing the possibility of a viewer ever discerning a single, fixed, uninterrupted body. Because, perhaps, there is no such thing—especially for queer people. Through the use of dyes and resists and other means of “editing” the exposure once it’s finished, Genis demonstrates the care and catharsis in the neverending process of bodily change. Even the chemistry of her process mimics chemical processes in the body; salts in the emulsion produce a rust in the cyanotype similar to the reddening of blood from oxygen. Blue becomes ochre, an arm becomes swallowed by a gut, five exposures articulate one haunted, stretched human figure. For all the work of building up information, her works shroud details as much as create them, charging the works with a secret, illegible language. As Genis describes best, “What is lost is always preserved; full erasure is never possible.”