Leslie Foster

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

As a Black American kid who grew up in Southeast Asia and who spent most of my younger years in search of an artistic medium to express my complexities, the first moment I operated a 16mm camera when I was nineteen felt like magic. In a moment I’d discovered a visual grammar that allowed me to say and explore much more than written and spoken language ever could. In the eighteen years since, I’ve worked to improve my fluency in that language and in so doing have discovered a deep love for sharing the grammar of poetic cinema as an educator and mentor, something that always deepens my own love for the medium. As an artist whose work folds experimental film and video art into installation, I see my practice as a gentle invitation into turbulent space. It exists within brief excursions into the liminal to find the point at which Black futurism, queer futurity, and mysticism collide. Through my work, which expands those excursions into more solidly constructed--albeit still temporary--contemplative ecologies that find sensuous interplay within the meeting of ritual, my own repeated attempts to embody ineffable, unquantifiable emotion, and dream logic. This practice is fabricated of repeated attempts to manipulate the chaotic and nonsensical beauty of that dream logic without destroying its fragility. As it has evolved over the past decade, I have spent the last seven years creating pocket universes where film and video elements of my work can dwell and breathe, and if...

Artwork