Leah Dyjak

Lives and works in Provincetown, MA

Artist statement

This body of work is centered on the failures of trusted and know strata. The work here features an installation of deconstructed photographs that speak to the ways in which familiar landscapes have been mangled and erased by the force of water. A Force Majeure or superior force is a common clause for companies to add to a contact. It protects parties from liability, in the event of an act of God or bad global circumstance. These ‘events’ include war, strike, riot, crime, hurricane, flood, earthquake, volcanic eruption, and things catastrophic, unforeseeable. The works presented here make use of a collapsed parking lot along the shoreline of coastal Massachusetts. The point of focus: the mutability of boundary, frame, and instability of surface. Asphalt and road lines are ubiquitous in function. These are the lines that are meant to guide and create order. Weather causes them to become futile in function and ultimately broken. This once steadfast surface becomes supple and mutable under the force of wind and water. Asphalt and concrete, elements of both naturally according to the earth, sprawl underfoot and overhead in the modern built environment. The crash of a wave can send a piece of asphalt the size of minivan ten feet into the air to have it land bent and broken like a piece of unfired clay. These works literally fracture traditions. The edges of the photographs mimic the fracturing of the land's edge. The concrete and asphalt appear soft, fallible and defeated by...

Artwork