Leone & Macdonald

Handmade paper with watermark
Each sheet: 17 x 27 in.

Iris water color prints
Each print: 29 x 46 in.

The artists shredded, boiled, soaked, pulped, and pressed every article of clothing they owned - literally the fabric of their lives - into a thousand sheets of blank paper. Each sheet bears their watermark, an image of the double fool, inspired by a 15th Century paper size known as the Double Foolscap. The blank paper, like the fool’s empty rhetoric, is elegant, perplexing and replete with possibility. Enigmatic portraits of two figures, frozen in private acts, and a book cataloging the artists’ wardrobe evoke a range of narrative possibilities. In the tableau, framed by the grid of the paper, the contemporary artist plays the role of fool, at once mad and prophetic,

Sterling silver dice with safe dials, on custom wood base
Dice: 1.25 x 1.25 x 1.25 in.
With base: 44 x 13 x 18 in.

Video installation with 12 independently choreographed, moving images accompanied by an asynchronic sound track
9 x 12 ft.

The artists elicited “passing” stories from Miami residents - drag queens, welfare mothers, rabbis, and mall goths, among them, and wove first-person accounts of deception, performance and mis-recognition into a video installation that testifies to the glorious impossibility of a single story.

“Calling into question the relation between insides and outsides, truth and appearance, identity and identity politics, Passing documents the false promise of the visible that underwrites a culture of legibility.” — Amy Robinson, catalogue essay, Passing

Branded shorthand on homosote
72 x 48 in.

54 steel branding irons with sexual terms in Gregg shorthand, 54 steel extension rods
Each iron: 8 ft.
Gate: 16 x 26 ft.

A meditation on sexual abuse. Text wall contains voices of authority, written, rewritten and erased. Wish bone hangs just out of reach.

Bronze child’s chair with spike, bronze wish bone, paper, chalk, nails
Wall: 11 x 32 ft. (variable)

An AIDS memorial created for the First Day Without Art. The artists filled a charcoal-grey sandbox with 1500 pounds of sand and over the course of twelve hours, inscribed the names of the dead in Braille on the sand’s surface. From above, the piece reads like an aerial view of a ruined city. The act of reading the names in the sand - of touching the braille - erases the names forever. The piece takes its title from a nursery rhyme written during the time of the Plague

Braille on sand, bucket, shovel
60 x 60 x 14 in.

14 words in Gregg shorthand, branded on handmade paper
Each 16 x 20 in.

Branded shorthand on muslin, in bed frames

Intercourse: 51.25 x 26.5 in.
AIDS: 50.25 x 26.75 in.
Kissing: 75.25 x 38.5 in.
Drugs: 50 x 27 in.
Condoms: 50.5 x 26.75 in.

Bed Frame Series
Fire on muslin
Each 32 x 24 in.

Ink, coffee, poison file
Drawing: each 9.5 x 9.5 in.
Poison file: each 16 x 18 in.

Steel with bronze knobs
Doorframe: 8 x 4 feet

2 tons of recycled tire tread, light boxes, morse code
Room size: 12 x 18 ft.

Wool
106 x 129 in.

Penumbra
Umbrella: Steel
64 x 68 in.

The Garden
Rake: Steel, fig leaves
96 x 24 x 1 In.

Steel, scale, bird’s nest
62 x 24 x 24 in.

Mixed media
9.5 x 24.5 x 8.5 in.

Braille on wet dry sandpaper
126 x 99 in.

A text, inscribed in braille, chronicles and critiques the inaccessibility of new AIDS drugs and in particular, a drug that arrests blindness-induced CMV infections. The 250,000 hand-punched braille dots, lit from the side and casting long shadows, are formed into the words AIDS and SIDA. The experience of being denied access is palpable: viewers are invited to “read” a text that is inaccessible to all but the blind on a surface meant to repel.

“The piece is a poignant manifestation of the conditions of misinformation and fear currently surrounding the AIDS epidemic.”
- Gretchen Faust, Arts Magazine

Darn
Double-headed sewing needle, yarn
4.25 x 2.625 in., height variable

Chemistry
Twin handblown champagne flutes with milliliter scale, on wood and marble base
19 x 19 x 8 in.

Shooters
Welcome mat made of loose marbles
29 x 43 in.

Double Cross
Silkscreen on wooden vanity
Silkscreen: 5.5 x 4 in.
Vanity: 11.5 x 34.5 x 11 in.

Such as We
Mixed media
14.5 x 13 x 1 in.