Ahreum Lee
January 25 - February 18, 2022
Gallery closed for in-person viewing. Online Only. View the exhibition here.
Exhibition Essay by Milly-Alexandra Dery. Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei.
Artist Talk January 27th at 7PM as part of the Art Now! Speaker Series. Online.
Lee shows that the same imagery exists in different contexts by employing a diverse range of aesthetic registers, such as that of the military, entertainment, pseudoscience, as well as one more immediately present in our daily lives: the interface of our smartphones. The visual vocabulary is varied, borrowing from the graphic universe of online astrology, video games, and open source documentary images taken from Google Street View. These references point to another blurred border, namely the one demarcating our experience of the world, constantly vacillating between the real and the virtual in societies where our daily lives are largely filtered by the interface of the web. Geolocation software transforms our relationship to our surroundings; for the first time in history, it’s possible to explore the tangible world through a digital space. Even more importantly, this virtual world map is no longer just a tool for giving us directions; it has become a territory to be explored in itself. But then, how does one understand physical space in this extremely controlled virtual space that is both structured and structuring, and furthermore, how does one navigate it?
