Second Hour, 2022, 75 x 38″, ink, oil, acrylic, sand, canvas, engraved aluminum. [Wall-mounted artwork in three shaped panels.]

We hike the last leg in the afternoon under white lightning. I feel nauseous on the descent and when I look back the peak is like a screen: a scene plays. I dreamed it last night and it’s superimposed on my vision, archonic and sinister. The lightning is now blue and black. We’re trapped inside something. Kerry asks me what we should cook on the camp stove and I tell her I’m having a type of seizure.

In the following days I feel the mountain shouting from every direction in a wordless language, all the flowers are pure sex and they want me to know. I write on it for days and the words spill out. This is unlike me, my brain seems to be affected.

Cushion Works presents eight new, wall-mounted artworks by Leslie Shows, who lives between Los Angeles and New Mexico.

Leslie Shows incorporates assemblage, drawing, glass, and sculptural relief in mixed media works that reflexively connect painting with earth processes. Solo exhibitions include the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter & McBean Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Haines Gallery, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Her work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Brazil. Recent public commissions include a large-scale glass artwork for the San Francisco Central Subway and lithomosaic for a school amphitheater in Richmond, CA. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, MIT List Center for the Visual Arts, and KADIST.

Masks are required at Cushion Works.

Cushion Works is wheelchair accessible; the bathroom is not. Please be in touch with access requests and related questions.

Photography by Chris Grunder.
Special thanks to Joe Melamud.