Leah Junquera (b.1992) is a painter living and working in North Carolina. Junquera received her BFA from Plattsburgh State University of New York, and her MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Junquera’s paintings embrace a sense of magical realism, where landscapes are not only spaces of memory and solitude but also sites of discovery and transformation. The objects she encounters—remnants of her childhood in the Adirondack Park and artifacts gathered from her wanderings—become more than mere fragments of the natural world. In her work, they are elevated to relics, imbued with meaning and reverence, as if unearthed from a dreamlike terrain where the ordinary becomes sacred.

The act of foraging for these objects mirrors the process of painting itself—a quiet, deliberate search for significance in what might otherwise be overlooked. A twisted branch, a weathered stone, or the water’s edge become vessels of memory. In this way, her paintings function as both preservation and exaltation, capturing the fleeting beauty of the landscape and suspending it in a space where time feels still and hushed.

Yet, within this reverence lies a paradox: the desire to hold onto something that was never meant to be kept. These landscapes, though rendered with devotion, resist ownership. They exist in a liminal space between reality and reverie, where nature remains both intimate and untouchable, familiar and mysterious.