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Knowing Is All. A claim from a multimedia work produced by Jan Leo. If one was fortunate enough to see this quietly spoken, but empowering show of forceful feminist statements, one would have realised that here is an artist who does know. Leo knows what it is to be an artist, what it is to be a woman, and therefore what it is to speak from a marginal place. The one page catalogue is printed over a balance sheet pursuing a point made in Leo's Summation pieces of the necessity of achieving 'balance'. At the bottom of this page is a quote from Silvia Bovenschen that says "attempting to knit the gap between the artistic realm and social reality is problematic in that this gap is ... the result of particular preconditions".1
Men are largely seen to be keepers of knowledge. Throughout history if women were thought to have any special knowledge, they were condemned for it, frequently via accusations of witchcraft. This exhibition, in part, hinges on the notion of woman as witch, priestess, soothsayer and goddess in opposition to women's oppression under patriarchal religious structures-in particular the domineering tenets of Christianity. In Constructed From An Essential Viewpoint Leo confronts the viewer with a pseudo-apse installation showing the curtained ancient figure of a crouching woman . As a woman one is still caught in the duality of identifying with the woman enshrined, and as a member of the congregation paying homage to a deity.
Leo is attempting to find ways outside of patriarchal constructs with which women can be comfortable. This is borne out in her screenprints, entitled A Marginal Place 1-5, where the addition of various processes