Seeds in a wild garden, 2009, Rubble collected from construction sites in Seoul, South Korea, house paints in colors of local gardens
Sandra Lee is an artist who produces sculpture and 2-D works, which addresses her interest in labor, materials, and traditions that have been passed in through time and culture and defining those elements through a contemporary lens. Lee had a recent exhibition titled “The Walking Mountain” at Drexel University. I had the pleasure of speaking to Lee about her work, her influences, and what it means to be an American-Korean artist and daughter of immigrant parents. The Walking Mountain exhibition consists of works that signify some of these themes through their materiality and their making. Here is the discussion that transpired.
Gallery View: Photo Courtesy of Atlantic Gallery Felix Quinonez
Atlantic Gallery, located a short walk from the High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea, is currently home to This is the Future of Non-Objective Art, curated by Suzan Shutan. This exhibition gathers over a hundred artists from around the globe, each exploring the boundaries of Non-Objective art through unique sensory experiences, experimental processes, and new techniques. Alongside the show, a detailed 110-page catalog is available, offering further insight into the works and artists involved. This large-scale exhibition runs from February 13 to March 2, 2024.
Lucas Simões, Dormentes n.2, galvanized steel, nylon ties, rope and pulley, 94 ½” x 67” x 8”, 2023 (left), and Dianna Frid, Weave, canvas, paper, embroidery floss, silk, aluminum, fabric, paint, 78” x 60”, 2015 (right). Photos: Barbarita Polster.
In two side-by-side solo exhibitions by artists Lucas Simões and Dianna Frid, both currently on view at PATRON gallery, the artists appear to pursue possibilities of meaning via symbolic pluralism; however, each artist could stand to learn from the approach of the other. In Luscofusco, Lucas Simões employs the metaphoric notion of twilight, positioned as the moment when light “shifts from presence to absence,” to examine persistent symbols recurrent throughout architectural history and their subsequent phenomenological shifts within unstable temporal contexts. In pre-knowing / un-knowing, Dianna Frid abandons linguistic text in its nominal sense, instead returning in her embroidered canvases to repeating patterns that form a material foundation for legibility – the marks made by the plunging and reemerging of the needle echo the repeating geometric shapes and fragments of Roman characters, allowing pattern itself to suspend the direct relationship between symbol and text. For both artists however, adherence to a dualistic approach to symbol and material, whether limited to form in the work of Simões or “text” in that of Frid, forms an impediment, preventing either from approaching the multiplicitous possibility they seek.
