Excerpts from The Incredible Machine, 2.1. Images courtesy of Leah Raintree

We first came across the art of Leah Raintree last year, when we were preparing a feature article on the artist Ernesto Caivano. At the time, Leah was working as Caivano’s studio manager – handling calls and requests, and delivering images – all the while working on her own oeuvre in the evenings and on weekends. Interestingly, in a way that seems fitting for the two of them to have crossed paths, there are a lot of aesthetic similarities between their work, something the two artists talked about openly before Caivano hired her. They both work in ink on paper and they both build elaborate constructs around their creations. But there are also distinct differences, apparently enough for the two artists to feel comfortable working together. For starters, Leah’s work doesn’t explore narratives the way Caivano’s famously does. And it’s abstract instead of figurative, rooted in deep thought around corporeal, technological, philosophical, literary, and artistic historical themes that are then explored in a process that is part deliberate, part accident and revelation. In the end, though, the work is still very much about Raintree simultaneously mapping out and discovering her own cosmology.