I am compelled to make artwork that is as straightforward, honest, and unpredictable as daily life. It is paramount for me to say what I want in an articulate way.  I want to make sense of the various identities a woman can contain, those that I take on in my daily life, and the female archetypes that I grew up with and surround us today. I’m focusing on reconciling the expansiveness of this mental, physical, and even geographic landscape and I find myself in a new understanding of the deep misogyny we live with. Formally, I am researching the negative space that surrounds both sculpture and image, and questioning what is “real” versus what is representation. My sculptures have specifically frontal views, presenting separate pictorial worlds in which to enter. I almost feel like I am making a scrap book of my life, but because I use snippets of images from pop culture they also end up being scrap books of this particular moment in time. In all of it, there is simultaneous joy, comfort and desire with the backdrop of clawing to make space for ourselves in this world. My space is made through an intuitive base of drawing and collage straight from the heart the transformation of clay reflecting the pulses of the body and ultimately, sculptures that contain the power of a distinctive vision of a singular woman.

bio: Leah Tacha (b. 1984, Lawrence, KS). She received her BFA in Painting from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 2007 and her MFA from SUNY Purchase College in 2009. Her first solo exhibition in NY was curated by Jon Lutz at Sardine in Brooklyn, NY in 2014 and she had another solo show curated by Lutz at 106 Green Gallery in 2016. She has shown with Morgan Lehman Gallery, SSD (Shrine & Sargent’s Daughters), Gold/Scopophilia*, Deanna Evans Projects, Daily Operation, Underdonk, RARE Gallery, New Baroque, and the Torrance Art Museum, among many others. In 2015 she was awarded the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop SIP Fellowship. In 2017 she was awarded a Windgate Fellowship from the Archie Bray Foundation.

email: leahtacha@gmail.com 

instagram @lbtk