Body, Light, and Other Portals: On Leah Piepgras’s Sensory Light Realms

“Leah Piepgras: LOVER” at No Call No Show features shimmering video works pulsing with sound, light, and liveness. Piepgras and curator Stace Brandt explore healing processes, erotics, and ecological beauty in a series of works created in the wake of Piepgras’s experience undergoing cancer treatment. Light From The Eye of God (2025) layers David Hykes’s 1983 composition “Rainbow Voice” with the whirring and chiming sounds of an Elekta linac radiation machine Piepgras recorded while receiving treatment. The video is eight minutes and forty seconds long, the length of the artist’s daily treatment. It includes footage the artist took of light particles emerging through fabric inside the Elekta linac machine, as well as shots of water, trees, and sky rippling and glittering with an entrancing rhythm. Piepgras took inspiration from her long drives to Mass General Hospital, during which she “watched the woods scroll by, punctuated by the glorious sun; flashing and strobing deep brightness into my mind and heart.” This work is grounded in two distinct experiences of light and its healing properties: as gamma rays used in cancer treatment and as pure sunlight encountered in the natural world.

The show is perfectly situated within No Call No Show, a new incubator space created by Boston artist Andy Li for emerging artists and emergent projects. Piepgras and Brandt transformed the gallery space by sectioning off one room for an immersive sensory experience. With no outside light shining in, Light From The Eye of God and Sun Lover (2025) are simultaneously projected onto the walls as a haunting and enthralling diptych. In the latter, dancers move under two harsh spotlights amid organic, metallic sculptures made by Piepgras. At one point, a dancer, motionless on the ground, is completely covered by a large reflective sheet. The video is a product of collaboration with choreographer Megan Paradowski and cinematographer Colin Lupe. Just outside the darkened room, Nature Lover (2025) plays on loop on a small TV with beautiful shots of light filtered through trees and hands caressing river rocks. In witnessing Piepgras’s tactile, erotic relationship to the natural world, we are invited to attend to the textural qualities of sunlight interacting with the camera lens.

​​“LOVER” is vibrating with cosmic wonder and pure sensory experience. Spending time with Piepgras’s videos is like being perched right between her eyes, where we are granted the rare and miraculous privilege of experiencing someone else’s visual, sonic, and tactile world. Piepgras captures and reflects back at us the moments when we are most open and porous to the world, when the world touches us back. For the artist, these instances of heightened sensation include moments of enormous trauma and grief, as well as encounters with the natural beauty of the earth. The works engage with trauma across multiple scales, from the individual human body (e.g. cancer) to the unfurling back into the outside world (e.g. ecological collapse). Piepgras realizes all this gracefully and lovingly, holding our hand throughout. What makes itself felt most strongly is what Piepgras describes as a critical and profound “love for the world.” At “LOVER,” flutter your eyes open a crack and let a stream of light in.

“Leah Piepgras: “LOVER” is on view through April 2025 at No Call No Show, 516 E Second Street, #307, South Boston.