Summary of cause:
The new body of work takes on the form of forest, stone, or ocean. I doused acrylic ink on wet cold press paper to create these abstracted landscapes. At first I was mainly thinking of forests, but quickly realized the abstractions could be mountains and oceans too. These are all places one can get lost within.
Much of my work contains backgrounds of acrylic washes. I see these washes as a blueprint to house the images, like little continents. I think of these backdrops as tattered preserves of historic pages that inform the viewer of my personal experiences.
In these new works, the materiality of the paint is central, and each color drip adds to the emotional range of these paintings. This method seems to suit my emotional balance these days. My receding, yet undefined horizon line.
The bats in Periodic Passage take on the employment of sails. The type of boat I used was a catamaran, often used for leisure and competitive sporting, but in other words associated with status. A vessel sailing on an ocean, for me, has always demonstrated human curiosity. This curiosity can morph into opportunity…the curiosity of a merchant sailing to the Americas to find new and prosperous trade. Human curiosity can also mean refugees piling into boats that carry them to safer geographic climates, or safer political grounds -- humans’ curiosity for upward mobility. (Ocean = Human Curiosity)
But human curiosity can also lead to envy. As I work with this image I think of my own personal history and that of my family's. Their difficulties of migrating to the US must have led to envy. Envy, occurring when a person lacks another's (perceived) superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it.
The ocean is such an interesting space and image because it’s the area that nations and states cannot occupy or inhabit. Countries claim parts of oceans in their borders, but it is always a space of passage, not of residency. Therefore, it is also an active and reflective place (contemplation) and not one of stasis. My interest with cliffs, mountains, forests, and bodies of water could all relate to this idea of unclaimed territory.
I think we have a difficult relationship with the ocean because we cannot inhabit the ocean, only pass through/over it. We can’t adequately settle the ocean. I don't swim, I can't swim, I never learned. I believe the sky and ocean on the right day collide to create not a horizon line, but an infinite continuum in space. When I chose to add the boats sailing all in the same direction, as a repetitive image, I wanted to play with making this work read as though it continues past what you can see in the frame.
Bats, the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight, are an embodiment of sustained flight. This idea interests me, because it cuts two ways: it refers both to the constant forced flight of many immigrants and refugees, and gestures towards upward mobility and hubris, false pride. I’m thinking of the myth of Icarus, both literally, and many contemporary applications of that myth. In the painting Time and Space and Light Grew Still you see an Icarus-like character, Saag Paneer, struggling inside of a flying device, imbalanced by many books. Oddly enough the whole unit is mounted to a tree. This image was inspired by primitive 19th century flying contraptions.
The redwood forest in Time and Space and Light Grew Still, gave this painting a feeling of spirit, seclusion, privacy, secrecy. The inlets of orange light provide tension to the space by accentuating the trunks and complicating the depth perception.
A few things about A Conventional Figure of Others. … Through the eyes of a child engrossed in the trends of TV western re-runs, I noticed the vast landscapes and I immediately thought these lands were of Texas, and I closed off any acknowledgment that these settings could have taken place in Dodge City, Kansas (Gun Smoke), or Lake Tahoe in Nevada (Bonanza). I investigated legendary characters and TV show heroes through coke-bottle lenses, not willing to see past Texas the state that provided hide-a-ways for fugitives to lay low and under the radar. Maybe I felt that this was what my family was doing until they obtained status to stay in the United States. Though I am also thinking about the Hindu Kush Mountains that shadow the background in A Conventional Figure of Others.
Dear Ordinary had Healed comes from a moment of total clarity, riding on a moped with my uncle in India. The laws of gravity did not apply to us. I was hoping to create sequential images, as one image becomes the positive afterimage and into the past and the next moment comes to replace it. I hope I create the sense that this image was playing in reverse, although the image painted makes it seem like it’s going forward. The red also reminds me of old photographs I find in my family album… why do old photographs have that red glow to them?
More soon…if you like.
The fractured landscapes in my work often reference the Hindu Kush Mountain range. I use the Hindu Kush mountain range as an allegorical space for a narrative of trans-migration. I was partially inspired by Bahman Ghobadi's Kurdish films, mainly A Time for Drunken Horses, and Half Moon. The idea of borders, or boundaries, plays heavily in much of my work. On a literal level, the Hindu Kush mountain range is a site where ethnic and political tensions arise because nobody is quite sure who, or what, belongs in that space. No one group can rationally claim ownership to that specific space, and as a result the boundaries that are carved, and decisions about who, and what, belongs in each place turn quickly to the absurd. Migrations, of culture and people, are often the result of absurd claims to an appropriated religious or culture presence in the space of places.
This video more specifically, is comprised of painted backdrops, and stop motion and cell animation techniques. The video signifies displacement and the force of migrating away from native lands, taking only belongings of what one can hold in hand: clothing, spirit, culture, religion, and memory. Assimilating in new locations, bringing new perspectives and taking on new perspectives. Letting go and gaining the loss of former title, behavior, interpretation. In search of one's self, after the loss of so much information, and the collaging of new information.
We see the horseman character as unsure what to search for and unsure how to engage with his surroundings. The character's clothes are a hodgepodge of Asian/English ethnic groups and time periods, anachronistically representing his "anywhereness" and "anytimeness." Finding, however, him in a concrete geographical space, the Hindu Kush mountain range.
Most of my paintings play with eastern and western painting traditions and philosophies and this video more specifically plays with objects vs. artifacts - forced/collaged space vs. pictorial realism.
In search of historical significance, Looking with Your Eyes Closed must also rely on the emotions and of the viewer. The staged day-in and day-out timeline sets an endless continuum (usually exhibited in a loop). The psychological tonality sets forth vast imagined spaces, with isolated travels (time to think). The warm kodachrome-esque physical quality of the work utilizes the function of nostalgic time and space. But I also hope the viewer stops the wistful reflection of the past to see the now, as though this character is your undirected avatar running loose in a geographic-spectacle.
I use the Hindu Kush mountain range as an allegorical space for a narrative of trans-migration. I was partially inspired by Bahman Ghobadi’s Kurdish films, mainly A Time for Drunken Horses, and Half Moon. The idea of borders, or boundaries, plays heavily in much of my work. On a literal level, the Hindu Kush mountain range is a site where ethnic and political tensions arise because nobody is quite sure who, or what, belongs in that space. No one group can rationally claim ownership to that specific space, and as a result the boundaries that are carved, and decisions about who, and what, belongs in each place turn quickly to the absurd. Migrations, of culture and people, are often the result of absurd claims to an appropriate religious or culture presence in the space of places.
It was, of course, the influence of the West - Britain’s Partition of India in 1947 – that catalyzed religious violence and territorial disputes in the Hindu Kush. During Britain’s reign in South Asia they managed to naturalized the conditions of their own presence. The British taught people how to behave and act “properly.” As the British pulled back, an arbitrary carving of boundaries (between India and Pakistan) caused millions of people to realize that they were “out of place.”
I see the same effects happening today, now through cultural imperialism. The Guggenheim Museum is, of course, an obvious visual example of this as it has expanded from New York, to Spain, and now soon to Abu Dhabi. The museum comes with its own institutional legacy and ideas about what should and should not be and how art too should “behave.” I am not interested necessarily in the overt geo-political aspects of the Partition, or of the political forces of cultural imperialism, so much as I am interested in how "we" collectively decide how things belong in what space.
So, the animation, Looking with Your Eyes Closed, utilizes the space of the Hindu Kush to depict a character looking for structure, looking for an identity and looking for a home that he feels is his own, not one that is forced upon him. The two By Your Leave paintings effect the same search, only here I am conflating my confusion about what is culturally appropriate in a geo-political sense with what is appropriate, and where it is appropriate, within the contemporary art world.
I am not nearly as interested in these ideas as grand political statements as I am as issues to deal with in the every day. For this reason, I relied on a daily Koranic dua, or prayer, for the titles of the two new paintings. I used the lattice work of the glass ceiling at the Guggenheim to represent the sun and the moon to evoke the daily aspect of these questions, but also to invoke the figurative use of the phrase “a glass ceiling” – a forced constraint placed on artists and art culture by the Western canon of art institutions. I angled the paintings on the paper as an attempt at the very smallest of revolts.
Indentity = an indentured identity.
Jeesoo Lee was exhibited during the Wrinkle in Time exhibition at BRIC Rotunda Gallery, summer of 2008
Jeesoo Lee is a South Korean artist based in Brooklyn who recently completed her MFA at SUNY in New Paltz, NY. Lee's current work is a response to the aftermath of natural disasters. This body of work began after visiting a site struck by Hurricane Katrina. Lee noticed a sudden vision of emptiness in the landscapes left by Katrina. Later this vision was reinforced after reading Julia Kristeva's seminal work on the subject of abjection. As the artist would describe,"beauty of another kind, destruction."
Lee weaves string and discarded objects to form abstracted architectural wall-scapes. Her process involves plucking, piercing, ripping, and scratching materials in order to accelerate their decay. The debris in her work speaks as much to the society that existed before a calamity as it does to the forces that tore it apart. This new landscape is one that is tragic and difficult to comprehend. Depictions of a natural disaster share a common attribute of Lee's work that is the dislocated objects of daily life. It is through witnessing the power of nature that we experience awe; in this way Jeesoo Lee's work is a reinterpretation of the sublime.
The work of Jeesoo Lee breaks down our resistance to destruction by reformulating fragments into new compositions. Her work appears to preserve the presence of society by collecting and collaging the debris of the everyday and transforming it into massive installations that carry the eye across, beside, and inside the work.
Untitled for abjection
mixed media installation, 22x18x8 feet, 2006
