The new Art & Environment Gallery at the Dana Building welcomed its premiere show Feb. 16 featuring the work of Ann Arbor artist Leslie Sobel. (Read more about the Gallery.) The event begins with a small program, including a talk by Sobel. (See pictures of Sobel's work)

The Art & Environment Gallery uses the greenest building on the campus of the University of Michigan as a backdrop to draw attention to nature and its intersecting influence on the fields of science and art.

'Watershed moment' exhibition by Leslie Sobel

Artist statement: "I have been fascinated with aerial views of landscape for many years. Chaperoning a high school service trip to New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina made the power and the significance of the Mississippi River painfully, viscerally, real. These pieces were inspired by that trip and by my recent discovery of a series of beautiful survey maps of the Mississippi River done by Harold Fisk in the 1940s."

"Some of these pieces start by making a digital image starting from old maps, changing them, drawing into them and altering them in Photoshop and printing them with my large format archival printer on Rives BFK paper. Some are purely hand-worked; only physical – using encaustic, collage, oil pastels, charcoal, conte and other media. The motion and physicality of the work echoes my emotion about the power of the river’s ever-changing channels. The two-part process of my work integrates technology and nature, echoing my thematic exploration of our interconnected environment."

Artist biography:

Leslie Sobel received her BFA from the University of Michigan School of Art in 1983. She worked in computer graphics for many years and did master’s degree work in Interdisciplinary Technology at Eastern Michigan University.

Sobel's work focuses on the environment and the ways people change, understand and interact with it. Sobel uses a combination of scientific imaging, including satellite and photomicrographs, computer code and maps as well as mixed media with encaustic (wax based) paint and sculpture to create her work.  A member of the Arts Alliance board and chair of the Milan Art Center, she co-founded the art alchemists, an artists”˜ collective revolving around the use of digital tools in art-making. She also was a partner in the Washington Street Gallery for a number of years.

She is an avid hiker whose connection with the outdoors is crucial to her work.  Sobel is married and has three young adult children. She has lived in southeast Michigan for more than 30 years and grew up in Chicago.