STATEMENT- My work portrays animal protagonists and the landscape we mutually inhabit. I am interested in ways of seeing and being seen: the meeting and crossing of gazes, looking through and seeing [what is] past. The mind’s eye, the forensics of memory, recollection, and projection, the existential filters of species and tree branches and deep darkness. Eyes are windows, windows are viewfinders, boundaries, frames, and lenses. Object, subject, free will, trespass are illuminated in the hidden moments between moments. The plasticity of identity, of identification, shares borders- human and animal, light and dark, body and space.
BIO- Lee Deigaard lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana and in rural Georgia. Her studio practice engages wild animals and collaborates with animals who are friends and family. Her work explores animal protagonists and the emotional spaces and physical landscapes where humans and animals co-habitate. She has shown and presented her work nationally and internationally and was recently selected as a 2017 Artist in Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Her series of nocturnal photographs of animals won the Clarence John Laughlin Award and was featured in solo shows at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2014 and at Arthur Roger Gallery in 2016 and in the group show Beauty and the Beast: the Animal in Photography at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. As a Southern Constellations Fellow and artist-in-residence at Elsewhere in Greensboro, NC, she invited horses to explore a museum housed in a former thrift store. Horses at the Museum is part of In Your Dreams [Horses], a long-term, multi-media art and research project exploring horse personality and individuality, sensory awareness and processing, and the boundaries and thresholds of shared experience. Her work has appeared in National Geographic’s blog PROOF, Lenscratch, Oxford American, and as part of Format International in the UK. She is a member of the New Orleans-based artist collective The Front where she has curated shows about animal companions Standing Heat: I am I because [my little dog] knows me and You Beautiful Bitch among others.
She graduated with honors from Yale University and holds graduate degrees from University of Texas at Austin and University of Michigan School of Art and Design. She was born and raised in Atlanta.