LEIF GARBISCH
Soulscapes
September 18 – October 25, 2026
Soulscapes is an exhibition of photographs and poetry by Leif Garbisch. A writer and photographer based in Harlemville, NY, Garbisch brings together images and words as ways of looking more deeply at the living world and at the relationships that connect us to it.
For Garbisch, images and words arrive quickly but the understanding they seek requires time. “Truth, on the other hand, along with answers to questions about our life on earth, come slowly,” Garbisch explains. His work begins in that distinction, turning toward what takes time to reveal itself and what, through sustained attention, can become an enduring relationship with others and with the planet.
Garbisch describes images and words as “windows into a growing connection with life itself.” His work in both mediums moves between the observed world and the deeper questions it evokes, attending to the continuity of life that precedes and surrounds human experience. “Life came before us,” he writes. “It came before trees and algae, before mushrooms, bacteria, and clouds.”
This practice of attention to the natural world is also a practice of becoming. Garbisch writes of his “leading, learning self and all my growing attention,” through which he “slowly open[s] the door to understanding and to the approach of love.” His work seeks not simply to represent the world, but to enter into a deeper relationship with it, allowing images and language to become vehicles for connection.
At the heart of Garbisch’s artistic practice is an expansive understanding of love as something still unfolding. “Love is not yet fully realized on earth,” Garbisch states. “And yet it longs to live together with us here.” The photographs and poems presented in Soulscapes emerge from this longing.
“For me, connecting in the fullest, deepest sense with all of life, welcoming through words and images and all ways [of] love – this is what my artistic work seeks to be and to do,” Garbisch writes. “It is what everyone’s work, no matter what in the world that work is, may likewise be and do.”
Leif Garbisch is a writer and photographer born in Illinois who lives in Harlemville, New York. His photographic work has been exhibited in New York, Maine, and Maryland. His books include the novels Conduit, Move, and The Magic Us; the book of poetry 24; and several books combining photography and poetry, including Our Light, All Ours, World Word, On Going, and Found Light. His most recent book, The Well of Understanding, is a work of nonfiction and is now available.
SPECIAL EVENTS:
Sat, October 3 at 3pm: Poetry reading and artist talk with Leif Garbisch
This exhibition is curated by Finnish artist Sampsa Pirtola and presented in collaboration with Rudolf Steiner Library (www.rudolfsteinerlibrary.org).