“Seeing Otherwise: Perspectives of Truth and Compassion” Gallery Night

Join us for an unforgettable visual experience that invites you to look at the familiar in an unfamiliar way, with the heart as involved as the eye. That encourages you to experience not only what is seen in the frame, but how shifts in perspective can open space for deeper honesty and gentleness toward oneself and others. Leslie will share how she began using art images to help others process intense emotion by first discovering this within herself.

Leslie Schoen is a central Wisconsin photographer and artist whose work weaves emotional truth with human connection. With a background as a Marriage and Family Therapist, she approaches image-making as a shared act of presence and attention, taking in stories and emotions and returning them as visual offerings that invite wonder, reflection, and unfolding meaning over time.

Her photographs linger in the intimate terrain of love, loss, joy, and struggle, honoring the way personal pain echoes universal experience. Driven by an inner need to explore possibility and tell stories rooted in honesty and compassion, she isolates small yet significant moments that become gateways to larger understandings—images that function as metaphors, puzzles, and open invitations to multiple perspectives.

Leslie intentionally softens and disturbs the clarity of form, using abstraction, diffusion, and blur as metaphors for the fluid and elusive nature of truth and perception. These obscurities create room for the imagination to wander and for the unconscious to surface, asking what is real and what is interpretation, and suggesting that true seeing requires vulnerability, curiosity, and a willingness to embrace complexity.

Blending photography with painting, layering, and digital effects, she deepens the emotional resonance of each piece and extends her language of metaphor and mood. At the heart of her practice is a desire to hold space for others—to gently guide viewers toward their own deeper wells of meaning and to foster strength, tenderness, and compassion through shared visual storytelling.

Wisconsin Medical Journal: https://wmjonline.org/current-issue/