Paper Vernalia: The Sculptural Drawing of Leigh Salgado March 20, 2010

The Box contemporary art gallery presents the work of artist Leigh Salgado. This collection of original mixed media work will open at the Costa Mesa gallery on Saturday March 20, 2010, from 7:00 PM until 10:00 PM. The exhibition will run through Friday, April 30, 2010.

As we usher in the new season with the vernal equinox, The Box gallery and Leigh Salgado unveil the diaphanous Spring with Paper Vernalia: The Sculptural Drawings of Leigh Salgado. Salgado’s sculptural drawings intimate the changing of the season with a fresh perspective in both the subjects and medium of her work. Painstakingly precise as well as gently fluid, her works embrace shadow and space to add another element to the traditionally two-dimensional art form. Here Salgado’s pen and X-Acto knife reveal a passage of time, as each work changes in respect to the angle and proximity of the viewer. “There is something tender about each piece”, says curator Johnny Sampson, “to think that there was so much violence employed at their inception directly betrays the human condition. Salgado’s pieces are a fragile reminder of newborn hope, of innocence laced with lust, of mortality, and above all, passion ”.

Los Angeles based Leigh Salgado’s art form is a unique mesh of pen and ink drawing, color and excised negative space. Her pieces are visionary with the intentionality of a surgeon--labor-intensive with an aura of complete freedom. “Salgado’s work is like a psychological thriller,” muses Sampson, “I can imagine her studio, a crime scene of eviscerated paper. It is fitting somehow, as we welcome in Spring, to imagine a layer of winter snow, butchered upon the studio floor.”

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