Glenda Leznoff

One morning, while packing up my parents’ home in Toronto, I found my late mother’s wedding dress hanging in a dark, empty closet, in an 1950s dry-cleaning bag. The dress, with its lace, tulle and beads was faded, but poignantly beautiful after sixty years. I was struck by the image of that dress, the essence of romance encased in a zipped plastic bag, like a body bag. The juxtaposion of innocence and death, hope and loss, youth and decay, was overwhelming. I reached for my camera. A few months later, back in Vancouver, I came across the photographs, and was haunted by those images. I began painting the Wedding Series. Although I’m not an artist who would normally use “pretty” as a descriptor of my work, I found solace creating paintings about innocence and nostalgia. In this era of political and social hostility, beauty is a refuge I embrace.