This series of newly commissioned color-focused films are experimental, process-based commentaries on ritual and recordation that build on Leah Rosenberg’s decade-long observational work of color collecting. Using inventively repetitious processes to accrue and layer color, Leah’s interdisciplinary practice of painting, sculpture, installation, food, video and performance is at once grounded, meditative, and playful.
Color In Twelve Parts comprises a series of 12 monochromatic videos/films that pull colors from all parts of life and bring them to you, one color at a time.
SILENT FILMS
March 2020 - March 2021
AT A LOSS FOR WORDS is a series of films made at home with my phone, in pajamas, while sheltering in place. I spent some time last year thinking about the everyday at a time when every day felt the same. I needed to muster cheer and motivation in myself so I focused on finding it through making these films. But we were all grappling with the same uncertainty and deep emotion, so I hoped that others would find some necessary amusement in the films too. It was a solemn time, a confusing time, a lonely time, a creative time. Color had been my primary medium, a universal language that brings with it a joy, a delight. While I wasn't sure if a full spectrum of color had a place at this time, I knew we still needed (de)lightness. I started to look at my house in a way I never had, seeing all the scenarios and sets I could make with the same things I’d been using everyday. That attention to setting a scene inside took the same attention as my usual practice of looking for color out in the world. The films had to get made in the moment because the house had to go back to its functional form by the end of the day.
Making something visual to connect with an invisible audience, I wanted to offer some moments of laughter through a tearful time. “Humor heightens our sense of survival and preserves our sanity,” said Charlie Chaplin. Is it possible to make something that offers joy by using what is at hand and without relying on color? Is there something funny about vulnerability? Is it still art/Art if it lives online and is made in the home? Is music a replacement for color, setting a tone and telling a story? How many different scenarios could I create within the confines of my home? I asked myself these and other questions while dancing and gardening and boxing and practicing and pretending, at home for a year that felt like many. I made it for you. I made it for me. I made it because relief, it turns out, is enough of a reason.
A 12-minute video for The Measure of Enjoyment exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center, 2018.
Riffing on favorite themes of play and pleasure, Leah Rosenberg’s newest work explores a place for painting that is colored by both failure and potential.
Building on years of paint-driven exploration, Rosenberg uses paint as practice, as meditation, as object, and as environment. The 12-minute video, Courting, begins with the artist in her studio pouring, drying, slicing, and wrapping layers of paint into brightlycolored orbs reminiscent of fruit or balls. As the subject of the film, she both creates and reimagines her work in the world. The film follows the artist around San Francisco searching, through improvisation and play, for the purpose of these paint balls.
Transported to various places that might seem an appropriate or familiar setting, the balls are put into action–rolled and lobbed, tossed and gathered–their use and uselessness revealed. These paint balls also appear in the gallery, posed around the space and on a custom-made see-saw bench, as if in conversation. More than props, these objects made entirely of paint find their place in the gallery, as spectators of their own past adventures into the outdoors.
Thank you to Jeff den Broeden and Amber Cady for filming, edition and direction.
