Artist: Leela Schauble

Title: Synthetic Species No.1 

Size: 70x70cm  

Edition: 3/8+AP  

Material: photograph on metallic paper and aluminium mounted    

Year: 2013

No material on earth has been so highly valued for its usefulness, yet so maligned, as plastic. We have ambivalent, divergent, and irresolute feelings about plastics, and have never finally decided whether they are good or bad. The idea here is to conceive works of art as social representations of a socially constructed reality. To create images which challenge the perception of our physical and natural world. I’ve been examining closely the course of our human existence and what to expect of our future. Environment is unavoidably changing around us, species constantly evolving, what are the new challenges we must confront? Is extinction probable for us creatures in order to make way for superior breed of life? Synthetic Species Series puts forth the possibility of evolutionary existence for an inorganic object, plastic. Breathing in life to shape a process of metamorphosis from an immature form, plastic bag, to an adult form, unidentified species. These species inhabit the sea and only live once nothing else does.

Born in Melbourne in 1989, Leela Schauble is an artist who explores the esoteric nature of the human psyche and human interactions. The works in Uncertain reference the artist's personal life and predicaments to portray the ambiguity of our communications and relationships to one another.

For Leela, “What it really boils down to is ‘what is human worth?’ To be human has so little to do with our structural design or genetic programming. Instead, it is what we do and how we do it; how people act and how they communicate their actions to others. To be human is to be able to choose to act ambiguously.”

Leela most recently exhibited in “Local Futures: The Culture China Young Overseas Chinese Invitational Exhibition“ at the He Xiang Ning Museum, Shenzhen, a critically acclaimed exhibition of work from the Chinese diaspora, curated by Feng Boyi. 

https://www.leelaschauble.com