The work I create first originates as a response to sites and objects that are ignored such as piles of trash, alleyways, overpasses or abandoned structures. In most instances the locations that I have shot in are not desirable travel destinations, are generally working class and are in industrial areas. This type of space has a personal resonance for me as I grew up in a very similar location in New England. I have a strong emotional connection, knowledge and familiarity with this kind of locality and want to document it in all of its poignant beauty.
From An Introduction to Representations of the Horror Vacui By Gregory Minissale For Drain Online Magazine of Arts and Culture 2007 http://www.drainmag.com/
Leah Oates¹s photographs of Transitory Spaces, articulate the amassed banality of the trace, the excretion of waste materials and by-products from social processes and consumption. The patterns in this underworld are parts of a map of history outside of the frame, seemingly infinite in its unstoppable self-reproduction, extensive in all domains of human action and spatial potential, and reflected equally in the detritus it leaves behind, traces of personality, micro-movements of identity, and configurations of anonymity. In an asphyxiation of content by form, the photograph literally squeezes out space to imitate the squeezing out of human figures, and of the processes that create this waste. This is both the utter fullness of the sign (the lack of space in the representation) as it tracks the utter fullness of the signified (infinite and bottomless waste), leaving no space in-between sign or signified.
The outside of the photograph is the ³everything else place² from whence the trash comes, the everyday processes of our gargantuan appetites and our wasteful lives. The traces and referents of a horror vacui, the processes, and imperatives of waste in capitalist economies crowd out the space of another referent: the past¹ of the photograph. The photograph blots out the past that it represents by deluding us that it is the present. Yet this photography is more than representation and illustration, it is also in a sense, an actualization of recycling, creating new matter from old, and recycling the past. It also transposes the cycle of consumption to the process of visual consumption, recycling the real and marginalized, the out of sight and out of mind into a recombinant aesthetics.