Leah Sandler
Leah Sandler is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Orlando, Florida. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Rollins College in 2014 and a Master of Fine Arts from University of the Arts in 2017. Recent exhibitions include the 2020 Florida Biennial, Interstice at MOTOR Los Angeles, CA, and Utopian/Vermilion, a solo exhibition at ParkHaus15 in Orlando, FL. Sandler’s writing and projects have been featured in publications including Salat Magazin, SPECS Journal, and Mapping Meaning Journal. She is the author of The Center For Post-Capitalist History’s Field Guide to Embodied Archiving, available in September 2021 through Burrow Press.
THE CENTER FOR POST-CAPITALIST HISTORY
Observing the decline of the Capitalocene from the sand pine scrub and urban sprawl of Orlando Florida, Sandler constructs parafictional worlds through mediums including video, text, drawing, flag making, and collaborative interdisciplinary projects. These parafictions flesh out imagined post-capitalist institutions, rituals, histories, manifestos, and landscapes. Traversing these worlds, the viewer is encouraged, through a visual language of repeated symbols and colors present throughout discrete works, to consider the inconsistencies of the invisible ideologies that uphold and subtend our current system, and to visualize the precarity of our contemporary moment.
Leah Sandler’s “Center for Post-Capitalist History” fuses together the capitalist-driven past with the archaeology of the future. Her project proposes the creation of a fictitious museum in the unspecified future that will house ironic archives documenting the increasing precarity of existence and scarcity of necessities that mark the latter stages of the Anthropocene. The Center demonstrates the logical conclusion of late capitalism, but also points to post-capitalist possibilities where interpretations of our cataclysmic age will be met with curiosity and bewilderment, and the recognition that the Anthropocene cannot happen again.
An introduction to The Center for Post-Capitalist History
Virtual Climate Change Summit 2020 (The Intimidator and Constituents)
Created after the first Virtual Climate Change Summit, held in November 2020, in anticipation of the next Global Climate Change Summit, this animated video is an allegorical acknowledgement of the messiness of Floridian political theatrics and our vulnerability to climate change.
