"BLEOC" (Brianna Leo C.)

Artist Statement

My practice operates through accumulation — images, conversations, memories, relationships — all of it eventually moving through painting and taking form. At the center of this work is my relationship to the body, shaped early, before I had language for it. For a long time the paintings stayed close to what was legible: what could be held and presented clearly. Recently, the work has turned toward what was buried beneath that surface.

Painting is well-suited to this territory. It works through layering, revision, and interruption — images built and partially obscured, tracking the way memory forms and collapses. Redaction entered my practice as protection, an acknowledgment that some experiences require distance before they can be held. But I have come to understand that redaction can also function as avoidance. The work now lives in that tension — between the instinct to protect and the pressure of what persists. What remains visible is not resolution, but evidence: of time, of force, and of what refuses to stay buried