Leah Manatis Painting

Leah Kay Manatis (b. 1985) is an American visual artist from Spartanburg, South Carolina currently based between Cairo, Egypt and Charleston, South Carolina. Primarily a painter, her work draws from a fixation on the ancient past, studies in myth (divinity of the mother), and a rich archaeological cache of iconography and pattern language that play with form in a decontextualized and linear space as a result. Discarded and found textiles as well as scans of other materials from the artist's studio (cardboard, drop cloth printed onto linen and cotton) effectively serve as the canvases of the paintings while a collection of photographs documenting architectural details and artifacts from various amounts of time spent throughout the MENA, Asia, the American South and southern Europe are employed as references in pattern language and attention to geometric form; universal symbols emerge and are applied to the development of the work. Part of the artist's bolder aim is to capture a sense of sacredness in a moment that feels to the viewer both from long ago yet somehow suspended in an auspicious moment of future-time.