Street Dreams
Moving freely between bars, ballrooms, circuses, and Dutch genre paintings, Leaf's works—especially those from the mid-1960s—reflect the artist's lifelong interest in theater, dance, and performance. They draw on the colorful cast of characters Leaf was exposed to as a child in Chicago, where her family owned and operated a tavern. They also reference arcade games at the city's Navy Pier, joke shops, department store mannequins, and her early aspiration to become a dancer.Several of these installations were featured in Leaf's first solo show in New York, Street Dreams, which opened in 1968 at Allan Frumkin Gallery. Having moved to the city eight years prior, Leaf devoured the stimuli of its streets, much as she had done in Chicago. "I love the feel of sidewalk," she noted, "the shiny hard cosmetic packages in Woolworth's. The tacky clothes-I'm at a window: in a restaurant... I have everything."Leaf's interest in the drama of street life finds a pendant in her approach to her own work; throughout her career, Leaf created constantly shifting arrangements of her artworks in her studios-both on Bleecker Street, New York and in Nova Scotia, Canada. Whether finished or in-progress, her sculptures, paintings, and drawings served as backdrops, protagonists, and props in the theatrical microcosms that she dreamed up.
To Create Life Out of Life!
In 1970, Leaf moved with her partner Robert Frank to Mabou, Nova Scotia, a village on the west coast of Cape Breton Island. She described their move as "us going off to a little island in our early middle age, starting over at life. It was the end of Street Dreams, the end of childhood." After years of drawing inspiration from city streets, Leaf was unsettled by the silence and stripped-down landscape of land, sea, and sky. She expressed her struggle to find footing in her new environment through collages that relegate the great outdoors to a view through her studio window. To adapt to her new location, Leaf began meticulously recording her surroundings, drawing everything from garden hoses and clotheslines to village children and fishermen. In addition to wide-angle cataloguing, Leaf also zoomed in. Studying microbiology textbooks and purchasing two microscopes, she began to look at microorganisms. This exercise generated a flurry of figures with microscope heads and biomechanical bodies with their inner workings exposed. In a moment of epiphany, she perceived the similarity between the jostling cells she viewed under her microscope and the urban hustle and bustle. Recognizing this underlying connection provided Leaf with a path forward to create "life out of life."
Climbing Still
Movement is a critical component of Leaf's work, with staircases, ladders, hoops, eggbeaters, hand-cranked machines, and treadle-powered sewing machines serving as recurring motifs.The sewing machine holds particular significance for Leaf. She often recounted the story of being a toddler seated beneath her mother's sewing table in their apartment on Chicago's West Side. Entranced by the rhythm of her mother's shoes pressing down on the treadle as she mended curtains, she recalled that her mother handed her a piece of blue, gauzy cloth adorned with white, embroidered dots. Swooning, Leaf felt at that moment that her mother was handing her "the starry night," a distillation of the universe and the infinite potential of creation in a simple swatch of fabric. From that moment on she decided that she would "make everything all my life with my hands." In addition to the autobiographical, Leaf's perpetually mobile figures and machines allude to the universal aspects of existence itself. In a world of both hope and despair, her figures climb, dance, and sometimes even fly.
The Prophecy of Her Power
For Leaf, the feminine was a broad category that moved beyond patriarchal power structures to encompass the fullness of human creativity. A diverse array of feminine figures reappear throughout her production, such as Cycladic women, fertility goddesses, centaurs, women in ball gowns, circus performers, monumental women with bulging heads, and women with cranks and gears in their torsos. Created with the artist's characteristically dark humor, these works challenge binary notions of gender and undo social expectations of femininity. The lack of individuation makes her feminine figures universal, timeless, and, in some cases, genderless archetypes.Leaf was initially reluctant to participate in the women's liberation movement of the late-1960s and 1970s. However, it was in that context that she eventually proposed, "Why don't the women just make a monument to themselves? Something so big, so powerful that it'll shut the men up for good." She made multiple sculptures, paintings, and drawings on this theme, envisioning a mechanized monument with a crank that activated a flailing tongue. In these and other works, Leaf's subject was not biological women but a notion of feminine agency existing across epochs.
The Two Sensibilities Walk Linked
Much of Leaf's art is animated by her astute and often biting exploration of the complexities of human relationships.Across her drawings, paintings, and kinetic sculptures, Leaf explored the fraught dynamics-both romantic and platonic-at play between two people, laying bare the tensions, tenderness, messiness, and psychological depth that define human connection.The characters in Leaf's work, whether fully formed or in states of becoming, are frequently autobiographical but are always grounded in a more universal human experience.Dancing, embracing, yelling, or sparring, these figures evoke the perpetual negotiation of identity and the sparks—of desire, animosity, rage, and longing —created by two distinct sensibilities within the shared space of a relationship.Leaf's hand-activated sculptures further animate this theme, presenting human connections as systems in motion-delicate, unpredictable, sometimes broken, and at times absurd. These mechanical tableaux reveal a fascination with the rituals and rhythms of daily life, and convey the emotional push and pull of partnerships where harmony and struggle are in a constant state of flux.
