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Leslie
Raymond
(b. 1968) is a video artist living
in San Antonio, Texas. She works with the moving image in a range of forms: live cinema performance, video installation, single channel video, and site specific projection. Her work has been shown at a diverse range of venues such as the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, the 50th Sydney Film Festival (Australia) dLux Media Arts "Future Perfect" screening, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Argentina) in which her work was awarded first place in video installation.
She and her partner Jason Jay Stevens, known as Potter-Belmar Labs, have been producing live cinema performances and building installation art together for over a decade at such establishments as the Aurora Picture Show (Houston TX), the San Antonio Museum of Art (TX), Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo NY), and Los Angeles Film Forum (CA).
Born in Saint Paul (MN) and raised in Detroit, Raymond received her BFA in film and video from Rhode Island School of Design in 1990, and an MFA from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design in 1999. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she started the New Media Program in the Department of Art & Art History.
bio #2
Leslie Raymond does not use recipes. All of her efforts are experiments. She approaches a selection of disparate ingredients with the spirit of a pioneer and an inventor. She is an artist without limitations of medium. Those extracategorical spaces are her territory, bringing together material and data--and often other artists--from far reaches and allowing a culture of relationships to grow. She creates art this way, and she generates grand spectacles this way. Leslie Raymond is, herself, one of these experiments, with a line of Russian Jewish heritage in one direction, and Chinese Taoist off in another. Her father is an architect; her mother is a potter. Where these strands come together is where Leslie Raymond begins, experimenting with process, texture, taste, and presentation.
Leslie Raymond
Artist Statement
"I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him." (1)
- Dr. Martin Luther King
"If art is not a medicine for society, then it is a poison." (2)
- Alejandro Jodorowsky
When I began working with the moving image over two decades ago, it was the beauty of celluloid film that seduced me. The optical printer helped me explore a visual poetry of time and space. Initially, I resisted embracing video because, while there were things that it did very well, its image quality never impressed me-- until digital technologies came along that offered dramatic prospects for image manipulation. Working in contemporary media allows me to be relevant in a sociological sense, connected to and in dialogue with the present moment of rapidly evolving technologies that impact everyday people on an everyday basis. More concretely, building on my practice with these new tools, I can gather, modify, and incorporate video into my live cinema performance work very quickly, underscoring a fresh and current relationship to place and time. The expanded possibilities of the enhanced digital image truly excites me.
The practice of self-realization through connection to the physical world of nature and the body is essential to my creative activity. As digital processes have subsumed my art practice over the last decade, I have gone to great lengths to maintain a relationship with the tactile, concrete world. It is the natural world which offers gravity and a fully realized logic that exists outside of or despite the evolution of mankind's systems.
My many years of t'ai chi and yoga practice have taught me that a system will move towards normalization on its own if allowed to relax. And so a primary goal of my work is to hold open a place for beauty, sustaining a space of safety where an individual may relax and reflect, and be encouraged to move within themselves. Herein lies a possibility for renewal and rejuvenation. There is power in the ability to imagine and form a thing, to fashion a reality, and with this power comes responsibility. I believe in building towards what ought to be, instead of merely commenting on what is.
Leslie Raymond
San Antonio TX
5/10
(1) quoted by President Barack Obama, December 10, 2009, during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize
(2) Jaymz Bee radio show, CFRB AM Toronto, September 14, 2000