Artist Statement and Bio

This exhibition will explore the remarkable trajectory of DJ Leon, a self-taught artist whose complex and thought-provoking compositions explore our national love for superheroes and American sport icons.

 DJ Leon's intricately crafted collages dissect and re-examine American Culture.  His time-consuming process begins with appropriating, curating, and combining hundreds of found images into collage format, adding proprietary images, text, and commercial memorabilia to the finished piece.  The next steps include transformation of the image into his preferred format.  Focusing on multigenerational symbolic icons such as Batman and Superman as well as sports icons such as Babe Ruth and Micky Mantle, Leon offers an exploration into our national nostalgia, the phenomenon of personal experience, and the translation of memory into image.

Collage themes are originated inside my head primarily with things that I think people enjoy talking about and things that create controversy, and things that are meaningful to me and are identified as American icons.

-      DJ Leon, artist

(b. 1948, New York) DJ Leon uses a combination of collage, photography, and text to make complex compositions on diverse subjects, from pop culture to art history. Each thematic work is an assemblage of crudely cut, found images sourced from Internet browsing, with photographs and both related and free-associative text. Although appearing to be slap-dash in style, the artist’s methodical and laborious practice involves embellishing, manipulating, and repurposing image and text to craft a complex mélange of visual power and tacit humor. His choice of materials and images is never random, and his allusions are carefully considered. This fluid, deceptively simple image world interjects content and critique, by disrupting and informing simultaneously, all with cheeky wit.

Leon’s works explore the phenomenon of experience and the translation of memory into image and form. Each collage combines 100 – 150 images, which the artist alters, interlacing aphorisms, cultural adages, and disjointive phrases, which suggests a new narrative for the piece, and adds humor and wit to the piece. The titled give the theme. The multisensory, interactive experience is heightened in the Lenticular and 3-D works, which create composite, animated images, made by the superimposition of lenticular screens. Lenticular images move as the spectator shifts his position, creating an illusion of movement. The lenticular technology activates Leon’s fluid, unexpected image bank, engaging the viewer in the production of meaning of the piece.