Leah Oates is a photographer based in New York City who combines representations of empty landscapes with juxtaposing perspectives, playing upon memory and ambiance. Oates’s eye for fleeting details, seen throughout rural and urban locations, crystallize into colorful, painterly mirages. By layering imagery, the artist creates optical illusions from the immediate environment, triggering personal associations.

Oates’s early site-suspended photographs were made in distant locations such as Newfoundland, Canada and Beijing, China. More recently the artist has paid tribute closer to home, rendering slices of landscape located in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Transitory Space 2008-2011 contains over two-dozen photographs that give way to an array of subjects such as industrial power lines, abandoned homes and empty fields. However Oates sets contrasting perspectives next to each other that appear in the form of silhouettes, evoking shadows over site with a deluge of color.

Leah Oates received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from The Art Institute of Chicago. Her photographs have appeared in numerous group and solo shows throughout the country – specifically at Momenta Art and Pierogi in Brooklyn, New York; Susan Eley Fine Art in New York City; Real Art Ways and the Housatonic Museum in Connecticut; the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill, Long Island; AquaArt Miami and Scope Art Fair NYC. Oates’s work is included in the private collections of Susan Bode-Tyson, Lise Curry, Bill Groom, Natalie Domchencho and Mark Waskow. Her works on paperare included in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Brooklyn Museum Artist Book Collection, The British Library, The Walker Art Center Libraries, The Smithsonian Libraries and the Franklin Furnace at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Leah Oates is also the founder of Station Independent.