Huxley-Parlour are delighted to current Love and Theft, a brand new solo exhibition by Grace Lee. For his or her second solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist returns to a preoccupation with loss and management in a set of recent small-scale work which navigate thematic and conceptual tensions of the archive.
Weaving collectively cultural iconography with private histories, photos are lifted from books, manuals, movie posters, ads, and images which are digitally collected earlier than being collated and compounded, recontextualising them by means of juxtaposition and affiliation. The result’s a figurative likeness, however one characterised by a simplicity of pictorial data, tracing line, form, and tone.
On this new physique of labor a persistent absence hints at a state past faces, objects, and narrative to the facility and the thriller of suggestion, difficult the objectivity we would affiliate with an archival observe, notably within the digital age. In Lee’s work the primacy of objectivity, what Hannah Turner, in her guide Cataloguing Tradition, derisively calls the “assumption of veracity and reverence for the chances of neutral, omniscient applied sciences”, is held in distinction to shadows and shapes which are extra recommendations than objects, backgrounds to a extra diaristic strategy which, together with their small scale, strikes an nearly confessional tone.
That is simply one of many tensions discretely woven into the work’s conceptual cloth, which concurrently attracts out the fraught boundaries between private and non-private, preservation and domination, in addition to questions of possession, id and want. There’s a fetishistic high quality to the 2 stylistically dissonant works that body the set up, mirrored cinematic photos of rifling fingers that function a touchstone for an innate, and innately flawed, human impulse. As archivist Jenn Shapland writes in her essay Finders Keepers: “Purchase it, acquire it, steal it, ahead it, preserve it, protect it, retailer it, home it, field it, maintain it, put on it, however there’s simply no holding it.”
