Leigh Cortez
About the Artist: Leigh Cortez is both an Army veteran and spouse of an active-duty combat soldier. She served on active duty with the 10th Mountain Division from 2001 to 2004. After leaving the military she pursued a tattoo apprenticeship and has tattooed professionally in addition to building a fine art career. As a multidisciplinary artist and married to an active-duty soldier, she has lived and worked in various military towns in the United States as well as overseas. The experiences of military life and tattooing in military towns influenced the medium and message of her painted works. Cortez’s work has recently been featured at Dulles International Airport and at the Military Women’s Memorial, formal entrance to Arlington National Cemetery.
Artist Statement: Disjointed parts: images collided, guts and chaos.
My work examines the unpredictability, tension and trauma of military lifefrom personal experience as a veteran, and spouse of an active-duty combatsoldier. Taking inspiration from artists of postwar Material Realism as well as Cubism, I continue the dialogue of the relationship between destruction and creation, concerning the picture plane and the image.
I work both with destroying images indicative of the military tattoo subculture and with material intrinsically associated with destruction, such as the intestines of animals traditionally used for sausage preparation. The visually contrasting bodies of work thematically unite in a new space causing contention and anxiety. A chaos of opposing styles and material disunity, the space is volatile and unsolved. An attempt to communicate the collateral of constant war and the consequence of its gruesome vanity.
The paintings on canvas are static, the imagery is fixed. In contrast the stretched bovine intestine is living, an unstable surface. Those two panels of the piece, which disrupt the stillness of the canvas panels, evolved over time. As the intestine dried it would crack and break under the stress of being constantly stretched. It would have to be treated, stitched, repaired. Its final composition created by the tension it endured.
This material reacts with the mash of tattoo imagery painted on the canvas panels. Whereas the tattoo imagery questions a superficial narrative of military culture, the bovine intestine panels represent a more intimate reality of military life.