The Art Portfolio of Leah Biggs
Leah Biggs is a Vancouver-based artist who is interested in the aesthetics and moods of noir films from the 1940s and 50s. In her artistic practice, Leah emulates and explores these aesthetics, putting her own unique spin on motifs of deep shadows, old-fashioned telephones, and beautiful women.
I really enjoy the overall mood that’s infused into Leah’s portfolio. Looking through these works, it’s almost impossible not to feel an affinity for the type of melodramatic murder mystery that the images evoke. Leah’s skill with figurative artworks grounds her drawings in realism, while the dramatic, fragmented and shadowed framing of each piece speaks to a dreamlike sense of surreality -- these are narrative moments pulled free from the stories to which they belong, leaving the viewer to invent their own context for each picture.
Leah’s recent Baggage Series comprises a number of loose, gestural ink drawings of stacked suitcases and luggage. The works, in black ink rendered in frenetic strokes across the paper, have a more chaotic mood but still seem tangentially connected to the artist’s noir series, as though these stacked suitcases represent a clue, or the aftermath of a certain tale.
