Vain Fictions of Our Own Devising: Postscript

cactusBARN is pleased to present Leigh Anne Lester: Vain Fictions of Our Own Devising, Postscript – a solo exhibition of works by Leigh Anne Lester, on view at our San Antonio gallery from July 4th to August 3rd, 2025. An exhibition reception will be held on Friday August 1st, 2025 from 5:00 to 8:00 PM. Lester is a FY 25 Artist Grant recipient with the City of San Antonio’s Department of Arts & Culture

Leigh Anne Lester: Vain Fictions of Our Own Devising, Postscript is a continuation of an extensive body of work that explores bio-engineering and the genetic modification of plants. In her works, Lester confronts the audience with the allure of “playing god” by manipulating natural occurrences through technology. The viewer is left to wonder if the power to change nature outweighs the possibility of toppling the balance of individual environments and the planet’s natural order.
The exhibition’s title references Sir Isaac Newton’s book, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which urges the reader not to attempt to transmute the patterns of nature, for it is only constant to itself. One of her larger installations in the show, Proclamation of Nature, adds onto the “visual vocabulary” of her creations by referencing sentence diagrams from old grammar lessons. Building off her foundational botanicals, Lester explores the nuances of distorting perception. Connected frames will house mutations in watercolor of her previous plant imagery and physically connect to other framed distortions with wooden lines/bridges. The resulting family tree/structure/system will have branches sprouting from the connecting “sentence bridges.” On those branches, draped like Spanish moss, will be cut-out painted blind-contour drawing sculptures of some visual vocabulary within the frames. The draping will obscure the underlying information.
Also in the exhibit, A continuation of the visual vocabulary that she has developed that recurs in her body of work. It is a slow motion mutation of the original work of Mutant Spectre and Mutant Genereate from 2010 and 2013. Lester process’ the original images through a computer program and then layers them over an improbable amalgamation of plants. In effect, creating a new species every time she make a new piece in the series. This generation, Adjacent Impression 1.4 (Radiating) is sprawled through the space to create a contrast to the structured Proclamation of Nature evoking an uncontrolled spread, stretched through the space.
Lester’s art continuously adds to a greater botanical ecosystem of her imagination, aiming to mimic genetic processes and recycle aspects of previous work to generate new, abstract compositions. Lester approaches her works like an animator capturing stop-motion frames of cellular mutation, successfully achieving a visual and thematic distortion through juxtaposed techniques such as blind contour drawing and digital manipulation. She also considers the global impact of climate change, researching plants and their slow yet insistent adaptation to man-made spheres. The artist states, “Technology and the human hand are important buttresses for [my] work, as they are how humans are changing our environment.”