June Leaf

Created with pen and ink and colored pencil on paper, 4 × 16 7/8 in. (35.6 × 42.9 cm). June Leaf’s 1968 drawing Coney Island is one of her most straightforward images, devoid of the surreal, visionary creatures and places that occupy her creative mind and guide her work. Yet its depiction of a middle-aged couple gazing at an amusement park carousel succinctly encapsulates what her art does: if we envision these protagonists stepping onto the ride, they become an apt metaphor for Leaf’s viewers, who similarly must venture into a deeply imagined realm, grounded in real human experience, in which the artist deploys the fantastic to explore the folly of our existence and the possibilities of consciousness.[11]

Created with acrylic and fiber-tipped pen on paper, 8 1/2 × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm). A relatively simple graphite and ink drawing from 2013 of the artist “threading” her eyes with her fingers finds Leaf literally drawing a line out of her brain/vision. The sheet revisits a motif developed in Threading the Story through the Eye of a Needle from 1974, in which a hand encapsulates an imagined scene seemingly pulled forth—threaded through—the eye of its creator. The hand joins the head explicitly in these images. Leaf’s representations and interpretations of thought as “infinite” seem to be her meditations on imagination’s expression in the physical world through the artist’s corporeality: ruminations on the creative process. The subject of how the mind’s contents become manifest through the artist’s hand is addressed further in a series of works representing substances that issue forth from the brain in various ways.[12]

Artist made sewing treadle, wire, copper, thread, 11 1/2 x 22 x 19 1/2". Making #2 includes the sewing machine base. It is entirely fabricated and features a dancing figure, delicately rendered as a wire line drawing within a circular arc that vibrates when the treadle is worked or the wheel connected to it is turned. Leaf has made many ingenious devices with triggers or other parts that activate little figures. These beg to be manipulated, evoking the delight of those 19th-century hands-on mechanical animations that seem so magical.[13]