about

🔻🔺

leo ariel is a queer, nonbinary Latinx poet and installation artist from Miami, FL. They write about healing, heartbreak, relationships, and their culture. They have dedicated their life to healing through writing, writing as a form of activism, and dismantling all that white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy necessitates. With a sun in leo, pisces moon and venus in cancer, they feel passionately, deeply and embrace the vulnerability that comes with falling and out of love a hundred times a day.

Their brand of sad boi, hidden (violent) femme poet is used as an ongoing performance piece; a base for all they are, say, and do. Their Truth. Performance of their poems and installations allows them to take up space and reaffirm their identity in a world that rejects (feminine presenting) gender-nonconforming people. It allows them to take up space in the art world, reclaim and establish their voice as a Caribbean poet. This is done through the use of the spanish language, references to Caribbean culture and the use of nature and the elements in their work.

Visually, their work plays with form, shape, and repetition of lines. This creates space to reject and warp syntax and grammar of the english language; resulting in the creation of a collage with words. The english language and its rules are rigid. There is much flexibility in word choice, how that translates into being read, and how that interacts with form to create a mood. Placing emphasis on phrases and words that are often overlooked by the language, their writing speaks in vivid metaphors. Deeply, accurately generalized, language takes on infinite meanings. The use of the spanish language and Caribbean cultural references in their work is a means of decolonization, reclamation and enforcement of identity. They strive to create Latinx solidarity and representation through the rejection of english and implementation of su madre lengua, their mother tongue.

Self published works include moths to a flame Fall 2017, acherontia ATROPOS Summer 2017, compassionability Winter 2017, poems for my lovers Fall 2016, vísceras July 2016.

Exhibitions include The Cuba they Never Had; soft, harsh femme for light(work), UNA Gallery April 2017; ALMA Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Symposium May 2017, UNA Gallery March 2017, Mangrove Cove for Rojas + Rubensteen Projects January 2017, This Isn’t For You S1 Gallery November 2016.

🔻🔺