Here comes the sun

On a table receiving radiation for cancer, Leah Piepgras thought, "This is so beautiful."

Leah Piepgras. Light From The Eye Of God, 2025. Video still. In Lover at No Call, No Show. All photos courtesy Leah Piepgras.

Emergence arises when a system becomes more than the sum of its parts. Scores of fish undulate in an adaptive school. Water vapor molecules come together into a cloud. Life suddenly rhymes. But it can be hard to see those fractal links when you’re under siege. A cancer diagnosis, for instance, might induce tunnel vision.

In 2023, artist Leah Piepgras learned she had anal cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes. For six straight weeks, Leah traveled through the woods every day from her North Andover home down to Boston for radiation watching the sun glint and skip through the trees.

“With my cancer, radiation was the primary treatment and the chemo that I had was not to kill the cancer, but to heighten the radiation,” Leah said when we met at her exhibition, Lover at the experimental space No Call, No Show (through April 19, by appointment only) in South Boston. “It was really crispy.”

If radiation treatment was an ordeal, it also led to Lover, a video installation curated by Stace Brandt.