On the loosely woven surface of jute burlap, Brooklyn-based artist Jennifer J. Lee paints photorealistic scenes that explore the saturation of images in contemporary experience. The fabric’s gridded structure conjures associations with pixellated screens, playing with the relationship between digital and analog representations of everyday objects.
Recent paintings, nearly a dozen of which were on view in the artist’s solo exhibition at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, highlight a personal glimpse of nostalgia, a fascination with the act of looking, and seemingly banal imagery transfigured into symbolic references and objects.
Lee’s paintings starkly contrast the instant gratification of scrolling through endless images, challenging the speed at which we consume information. She describes her process as a form of “waking meditation and sustained observation,” translating digital pixels into hand-painted brushstrokes and stretching fabric to simulate screens.
The artist’s technical ability to translate finite details onto a relatively rugged surface speaks to the time and attention required to produce a single painting. Small in scale, her pieces reveal surprising interactions between the objects’ surfaces and the woven jute.
Denim, for example, sports its own signature weave, which in works like “Acid Jeans” seems to somehow exist in both harmony and opposition with the burlap. Portraying a smooth object in “Security Mirror” presents the challenge of making glass appear polished while nodding to the graininess we associate with CCTV footage. And a bunch of footprints in sand suggest another kind of graininess altogether, the shadows and subtle colors of which seem to vibrate or flicker thanks to the low-thread-count jute weave.
Lee’s recent paintings harken back to Y2K, an era on the cusp of immense technological and social change as personal computers, mobile phones, and the internet became more widely available, spawning the social media platforms we still use today—albeit profoundly changed since they first emerged.
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