Leah Korican: WHOLLY HOLEY

The pieces exhibited in Wholly Holey continue a years long body of work based on doily images by visual artist and poet Leah Korican. These works, most created during 2020, reflect on the experience of absence and presence. The fact that a shape still holds together even when riddled with holes. The titular piece consists of 150 4”x4” images created on cut up postcards, over the course of the last eighteen months and explore the form of a circle within a square. This form is seemingly limitless in the options for improvisation it offers. The initial pieces in the series are painted in neutral colors with lace doily patterns, later explorations include linear overlays, still later, around the beginning of the pandemic, holes are punched in the artwork, and color was introduced. Themes include meditation, isolation, connection, presence and absence, loss and renewal.The accumulation of varied images is meditative and enlivening. The pieces hang in a semi-chronological fashion and invite the viewer through a non-verbal narrative while the checkerboard shape references quilt patterns and the enduring nurturance of creative practice.

Leah Korican lives and works in Oakland, CA. She received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her public art pieces include the Nashville International Airport, Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont,CA, among others. She has exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, The Triton Museum in Santa Clara, The San Francisco Art Commission, and the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. Her work has been written about in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Walnut Creek Journal. Her poetry has been published in “Her Words” anthology Shambhala, and West Wind Writers and Artists Anthology. She teaches art at Bentley School in Oakland’