Lisa Leitner
- Editor at Titan Contemporary Publishing
- Dec 15
- 3 min read
Lisa Leitner is a digital collage artist who has won multiple recognitions including a scholarship and Creative Vision Award from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) as well as several artistic awards from St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland. Her practice can be described as conveying: “Natural objects such as plants and landmarks…[which carry] the essence of particular environments and moments in time. Through the merging and separation of media, I investigate the relationship between interior and exterior worlds, asking viewers to consider what is remembered, what is imagined, and what is real. When we reminisce, how much of what we recall is rooted in lived experience, and how much is shaped by memory itself? Which objects and landscapes tether us to specific places and points in time?”, as Lisa states.
Incorporating photography, analogue collage, texts, vintage photographs, and sometimes dyes as well as sketches, the digital artworks of Lisa Leitner are assembled from raw source material which convey figures, landscape, interiors, exteriors, architecture, foliage, and the capturing of light. The digital art is constructed in Photoshop and often combines raw imagery into geometrically-aligned planes which are melted into smears of color and pixelization. The most interesting pieces tend to be where much of the original photography from the source material remains intact for the most part and becomes awashed in neon and pastel smears of digitized application tools. In the original source material, we will find childhood memories from vintage photographs as well as classical statues and architecture drenched in washes of pink and magenta, which carries a vaporwave aesthetic.
The technological and contemporary appeal of these works comes from integrative techniques. By combining analogue collage, both literally and figuratively, as well as composing her digital composition much like a collage or assemblage, the digital art by Lisa Leitner carries relevant interdisciplinary implications. In this haze of distortion, figures and motifs are obscured but left intact enough to be recognizable, just barely, in order for us to investigate the mystery of their composure. But besides process, these works can be appreciated as wholistic works of analogue digital art based on composure of documentary-based source material blended into a sfumato of pixelized distortion and electrical interference. Much like a lightning storm, we travel through the realm of Lisa Leitner’s imagery and discover familiar imagery heavily distorted under geometrical, angular, pinched, and dyed compositions of great mystery. Like a terrain of unexplored territory, we will find environments within these digital artworks which amplify ethereal dreams and mystify settings for deeper understanding and visual study.
Digital Collage V. 5 (pictured above) contains what appears to be portions of a classical sculpture which could be a mythological or religious depiction such as the goddess Nike or an angel. The mythological sculpture becomes distorted through atmospheric vibrations of vaporwave colors and broad linearity of light, awashed in tones of neon pastels. The vast sky becomes a haze of misty hue as if we have entered an hallucination.
A bold and combinative artist, Lisa Leitner advances digital art and collage to have implications outside of traditional analogue processes into integrative studies of reinterpreting imagery through complex processes and composure. Like a fine ballet dance, these digital collages harmonize a composition through angularity, geometry, and controlled synthetic light but synthesize and distort various angles of perspective and fragmentation like fierce electrical interference.
