Katrina Leslie

Katrina Leslie’s Lisch Nodules is a two-channel video composed of multiple clips drawn from a medical film archive, as well as new and found footage of birds. By running them simultaneously beside the other, the video asks the viewer to compare and contrast the content of each channel. The chosen footage is close and intimate, thus placing the viewer as a voyeur. Due to the length of the video, the viewer’s relationship to the content changes from an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism to indifference. As such, the video exposes the viewer to themselves, drawing attention to their own transition from uneasiness to apathy. For the sound design, samples of different breathing patterns are layered with the chirping and chattering of local birds, giving the channels individual ambient noises. With the addition of samples from the song Look What Happened to Mabel by Bernadette Peters (1974), the audio directs the viewer’s attention to a main focus of the work:, flesh. Leslie aims to expose how humans in western society are selective when viewing the mechanics of life and death,  impelled to find beauty in life, and ugliness in death.

Katrina Leslie is a multidisciplinary artist who specializes in sculpture, audio, and video. Her practice unpacks themes of death in personal and sociological contexts. Leslie’s work mixes the voyeuristic and the visceral to illuminate the congruous relationship between life and death. Her work also addresses the stigmatization of death, and death practices prevalent in Western society.