Dancer and Artist Leah Schrager Brings Her Picture Poems to CoCA This Week

"There's a point I've been hitting in the last few years--I'm finding dance very ephemeral, as many people would say. You do it and it's gone. And you need people, you need space, there are a lot of different limitations," Leah Schrager told me, sitting on the back patio of a Park Slope bar recently. "And this, I can just do."

Schrager was explaining the odd process that's taken her from graduating with a double-major in dance and biology from the UW back in 2007 to this coming weekend, when her first art show, called Pretty Whatever, opens at CoCA Ballard this Thursday (reception at 6 p.m.; show through August 7), 2,500 miles from Gowanus, Brooklyn, where she now calls home.

A native of someplace called Steamboat Island, which I am assured is nearer Olympia than Shelton, Schrager has had an oddly eventful artistic career since graduating. While she performs with a few small companies in NYC and apprentices with Zvi Gotheiner's ZviDance, in Seattle, she's best known for her role as the body of "Rimas," filmmaker and artist Linas Phillips' (Bass Ackwards) mentally challenged brother in Lasagna, or: How I learned to stop slipping towards the prison of permanent darkness, a collaboration between Phillips and theatre artist Jim Fletcher, which went up at On the Boads in January 2009. Aside from a couple walk-ons, either as whatever female was required at the moment or to appear as an alien at the end, she mostly trotted around stage with a television for a head, through which Rimas appeared as video.

But of course, performance opportunities from artists you run into in airports (as was the case between Schrager and Phillips, travelling from New York to Seattle; they'd met previously through working with 33 Fainting Spells) don't come along every day. As Schrager pursued her dance career in New York, she began turning to other creative outlets from which the work in Pretty Whatever grew out of.

Dubbed "phoems" by Schrager, the work in show is the simple combination of photos and text. The earliest material, which she began concocting in fall 2009, paired shots from her dance and modelling portfolio with snippets of text from her journals. From there, Schrager cast a wider net, repurposing Facebook status, collaborating with other photographers, and developing an increasingly large body of work which has previously shown in small venues in New York and Kyoto, Japan.

Often, the relationship between text and image is vague at best. In one image (most of which are simply known by their text), a voguish, vaguely Eighties looking editorial shot of Schrager blowing a kiss is counterpointed with the phrase, "People loved it. I'm fucked."

"I was sitting in a theatre, watching a dance performing that I was writing a review of," Schrager recalled, "and people really loved it. So that's what I wrote in my notebook." Months later, searching for text, she came across it and it became part of the body of work.

Other pieces are strongly biographical. While Schrager seems to have moved beyond some of the earliest pieces, which paired cityscapes with her poetry about her travails as a young artist in New York, the more subtle ones will probably show up in the up-to-fifty works in Pretty Whatever. One of the earliest, in fact, is a simple photo of the Brooklyn Bridge with the attendant text: "My pen has run out. I guess I live here now."

"One day I was writing in my journal and my pen ran out," she recalled simply. "And it was two weeks or a month into living here. And my living situation was pretty bad. I was subletting--no! I was waiting to sublet a place, and this woman just kept putting me off, for like two months. She'd be like, 'You can move in in two weeks,' and then, 'You can move in two more weeks...'" She shook her head trying to recall the details, but overall, the anecdote reveals a lot about her development in creating visual art: from the earliest, heart-on-her-sleeve poetry and drama images, Schrager has proved willing to relax and let more subtle combinations of visual image and textual content come together.

Some of the most interesting works in Pretty Whatever, in fact, are the least autobiographical, relying instead on the almost random interplay of repurposed images and texts. At one point, Schrager moved on to creating pieces based on people's Facebook statuses, and indeed, when I first saw some of the images in Pretty Whatever, what most struck me was their similarity to the randomness of Facebook news feeds, with the mixture of inane and emotional, random and sentimental all jumbled up together.

Schrager agreed, and admitted that she's been trying to plan some sort of surprise based on the concept for the show's Thursday night opening at CoCA's gallery space up on Shilshole Bay. I'm not sure if you have time still, but it's probably worth RSVP-ing via Facebook.