Over the course of the past several years, Leat Klingman has gradually developed a set of characters and performances that people and animate a magical world of her own devising. She painstakingly crafts costumes for her own hands for use in video taped performances for which she also builds sets and selects music. Viewing her work, one rapidly loses one’s sense of scale as finger-size characters take the place of figures familiar from our surroundings. Klingman is a story teller who draws on her background as a musician, dancer, painter and sculptor to create narratives which inter-mingle childlike fantasy with themes common in adulthood. Her painterly and tactile sensitivity is clearly apparent in the rich coloring of the video A Wolf I Say and her childhood experience of dance and professional training as a pianist come through in the drama of Carmen. Each of Klingman’s stories is carefully tailored to involve the viewer in minute visual details and emotional nuance as Klingman gradually externalizes a rich interior world meant to bring us closer to the child inside ourselves. At the center of this world is Mister Pink, a flying pink creature that Klingman sees as an archetype representing something beyond us, an ideal we cannot achieve. He embodies a complete connection to nature and a state of being that transcends human conceits.

Leat Klingman was born in Israel and has spent the last 4 years living and working in New York. Her work was recently exhibited in two solo exhibitions at The Kibbutz Gallery and “Beit-Ha’Amanim” in Tel-Aviv. Her work was also included at the Tel-Aviv Cinemateq at the International Festival for Video-Dance. She recently received residencies at the Chashama Studio Program, Makor Center and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work will be featured in Kulturhouse in Stockholm in May 2008. This is her first solo-exhibition in NY.