Clam Bar with Umbrellas

(b. 1948, New York) DJ Leon is widely recognized for his artistic practice which is two-fold:  photography and mixed media assemblage.  Leon's beach photography draws clear inspiration from the style of Massimo Vitali, capturing social gatherings and pleasure seekers at the shoreline. With a keen observational eye, Leon documents people in candid, often playful group interactions, set against the backdrop of expansive, sunlit beaches and scenic coastal environments. These images explore the human presence in leisure—collective joy, intimacy, and the rituals of relaxation—framed within beautifully composed natural settings. His color photographs often focus on popular places for social gathering.  Leon's lens captures the scene with an anthropological style that both records and comments on contemporary life. 

His mixed media assemblages use a combination of collage, photography and text to make complex compositions on diverse subjects, from pop culture, super heroes to art history.  Each thematic work is an assemblage of crudely cut, found images sourced from Internet browsing, with photographs and both related and free-associative text.  Although appearing to be slap-dash in style, the artist’s methodical and laborious practice involves embellishing, manipulating and repurposing image and text to craft a complex mélange of visual power and tacit humor. His choice of materials and images is never random, and his allusions are carefully considered. This fluid, deceptively simple image world interjects content and critique, by disrupting and informing simultaneously, all with cheeky wit.  

Leon’s works explore the phenomenon of experience and the translation of memory into image and form.  Each collage combines 100 – 150 images, which the artist alters, interlacing aphorisms, cultural adages and disjointive phrases, which suggests a new narrative for the piece, and adds humor and wit to the piece.  The titles give the theme.  The multi-sensory, interactive experience is heightened in Lenticular and 3-D works, which create composite, animated images, made by the superimposition of lenticular screens.  Lenticular images move as the spectator shifts his position, creating as illusion of movement.  The lenticular technology activates Leon’s fluid, unexpected image bank, engaging the viewer in the production of meaning of the piece. 

DJ Leon began devoting himself exclusively to a photo-based practice after retiring from Wall Street in 2009.   Although not formally trained, his artistic practice has developed into multiple forms, from making images with a camera, to combining and transforming images into collages.  His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and is included in the largest Superman museum in Illinois.