Bonny Leibowitz

Bonny Leibowitz’s Out of Place operates as a shifting memory of landscapes continually altered by human intervention and environmental change. Through fragmented sculptures and photography, she explores the complex entanglements between culture and ecology.

Leibowitz’s consideration of nature in relation to the built environment draws from concepts of Post-Naturalism, a perspective that questions the objectification of nature as pristine and separate from humans. The installation addresses the displacement, destruction, and abandonment of the natural world, pointing to the tensions between environmental costs and conflicting human desires.

Leibowitz culls and gathers mangled metals and plastics from dumps, construction sites, and roadsides during travels across Texas. These remnants are combined with fallen tree parts and photography to form hybrid landscapes. Her photographs of landscapes affected by tornadoes, drought, and flooding are printed onto wall- sized paper. The images are collaged into three-dimensional structures and scenes that peel away from walls and collapse to the floor.

Severed from their origins, these elements are reassembled into unstable new configurations where distinctions between the natural and the manufactured, the past and the present, the physical and the representation, begin to collapse.

The work serves as fleeting, elegiac monuments to trees, water, land, and sky.

As ecosystems degrade and transform, so too do the narratives we construct about them. Out of Place functions as a facsimile, revealing nature as memory—unsettled and continually in flux. We are both the maker and the made, entrenched in the conditions we create.

About the Artist

Bonny Leibowitz is an artist focusing on how nature is an ever-evolving system, intricately intertwined with human culture. She constructs hybrid objects and installations to create facsimiles of nature, blurring the boundaries between the manufactured and the organic. Leibowitz is a recipient of the Nasher Sculpture Center 2024 Nasher Artist Grant. Her solo exhibitions include Adventures in Plunderland at Oak Cliff Cultural Center, Dallas, TX, I Make My Own Weather, at The MAC, Dallas, TX, Behind The Seen at The Art Gallery at Collin College, Plano, TX, Super Unnatural at Terrain Dallas, Dallas, TX, Appearances at Baugh Center for the Visual Arts at Mary Hardin Baylor University, Belton, TX, Remnants and Other Elevated Parts at No.4 Studio Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Pending Situations at The Neon Heater in Findlay, OH, Conditional Constructs at Forum Gallery in Houston, TX, New Artifacts at Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas, TX, Suspended Beliefs at Art Cube Gallery in Laguna Beach, CA, Symbiosis at The Museum of Art, Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, TX and Plight of the Pleasure Pods at Cohn Drennan Contemporary in Dallas, TX. Her installation, Trees I Have Loved, is a permanent outdoor installation at Jim Bob Art Park & Nature Trails in Benjamin, TX. She was a 2025 panelist at The 31st International Sculpture Conference and a Visiting Artist at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2023 and was featured in New American Paintings in 2019.