Roz Leibowitz Press
Leibowitz portrays the efforts of these women as creating what she calls “conduits to the shadow world” that are still open to us today. Her work is an example of scholarly giving: she wants to help her viewers and herself become part of a just-dusted-off world of feminine imagination rather than blocking the way with an authorial injection into found aesthetic artifacts. She thinks of her drawings as “pages loosed from a long, dreamy novel,” using found ledger papers and pages from diaries to create a sense of the work as fragmentary—not the whole story. The blanks between the pages push us, the audience, to fill in the gaps, allowing us to enter the imaginative lives of her Victorian subjects. Leibowitz invites us to the door of that world and shows us the way in.
From Kim Bennett, Psychic Cherries: Into the Shadow World with Roz Leibowitz, ARTICLE: ART AND THE IMAGINATIVE PROMISE, winter 2007. Article Journal
Penciled on old, weathered pieces of paper, Ms. Leibowitz's drawings look uncannily like the works of a self-taught Victorian mystic. Narrative imagery focuses on women, implying occult experiences and same-sex eroticism; these themes are enhanced by densely elaborated patterns that cover dresses, fill pictorial space and decorate the borders. All together it suggests an artist in a state of ecstatic creative possession.
Ken Johnson, New York Times, 2/13/2004