San Antonio artist Leigh Anne Lester’s odd botanical universe at center of new exhibition

Head-scratching moments are par for the course when Louisiana-born, San Antonio-based artist Leigh Anne Lester starts explaining her distinctive work. A brainy amalgam of drawing, painting and sculpture, Lester’s creative endeavors explore such heady topics as genetic modification and the myriad consequences of human intervention on Mother Nature. Simultaneously representational and abstract — a feat within itself — Lester’s projects are easy to appreciate on an aesthetic level but contain layers of meaning that can be far from obvious. 

Intriguingly, a large percentage of Lester’s oeuvre is based on three pieces she created more than a decade ago. The germinating seed, 2010’s Hunting Art Prize-winning Mutant Spectre is an intricate graphite drawing one might describe as Frankenstein’s monster in botanical form. Adding colored pencil to the mix, its next of kin — 2013’s Mutant Generate — comprises two botanical drawings stacked on complementary layers of drafting film. With those three drawings as her key source material, Lester zooms in, distorts and transforms her own subject matter into entirely new works. In addition to digital processes, Lester employs the classic art-class activity of blind contour drawing to add organic layers of distortion. Curiously reminiscent of DJ culture, these sample-driven remixes of her own work are in heavy rotation in the Ruiz-Healy Art exhibition “Vain Fictions of Our Own Devising,” her first solo show since 2019.