By painting family photos and advertising art from the eras of significance to Tara Leach’s matrilineal family (most notably the 1920s/30s, 1950s/60s, 1980s, 2010s, and present day) the artist temporarily overcomes the linear nature of time. As a photograph can grant access to an instant in the past, her paintings stretch time, spending hours with a millisecond, carefully observing, reconsidering, recombining, reforming and re-contextualizing details according to the artist’s feelings and intuition. That manipulated time is time spent with ancestors and descendants, past and future, and the paintings and collages that emerge from it, sourced from snapshots and vintage advertisements, use a blended visual language of dated marketing propaganda and expressionistic mysticism. Inevitably, the series is about the crushing obligation of being a legacy, and the joyful responsibility of being a forebear.

The women Leach depicts are perpetually engaged in answering the question, “What will it be today?” or, more precisely, “What will I be today?” She is preoccupied by the time and energy put into confronting this question, wondering how much is left over for self-actualization, activism, or creative fulfillment. The tension between the apparent and actual values of domestic work, which is typically done by women, fascinates her. It is precisely that invisible work that keeps people alive!

Even the question “What will be for dinner today?” represents a fantastic amount of knowledge, skills, traditions, time, finances, ecosystems, and relationship that are navigated, accommodated, and recalled for each meal. The apparent work that occurs in the kitchen is served from atop a mountain of learning and practice, sacrifice and striving.