Leeny is an artist based in Brooklyn, originally from Atlanta. Informed by their Southern upbringing and queer perspective, their work is rooted in southern experiences, drawing inspiration from folk music, regional landscapes, and ideas of home. Their practice creates space for moments of joy that resist traditional notions of gender, sexuality, family, love, relationship, and belonging.

Leeny’s current paintings explore the idea of witnessing the witness, blending surrealism and folk influences to create figural narratives that reflect on our relationship and perceptions of time, as we navigate being a witness through the past, present, and future.

Interested in the absurdity of the human experience and human need for meaning and discovery, Leeny’s work speaks on patterns of connection and intimacy through environment, object, community, companionship, self, ritual, and identity. Their paintings explore the relationship between witnessing experiences of intimacy and connection and our relationship to understanding existence. Moments of playfulness and love shared with others, the auric spirit of a gifted object, the energy of community, the ritualistic connection of self and the environment, become narratives in their paintings that act out these dynamics of exploration, knowing, and understanding.