Everything is a joke, and everything is completely sincere...
Grace Leefor The Auction Collective
Perched upon a pedestal sits an alligator skin bag, a teeming pit of young crocs crawl and squirm below it. Playing with duplicity and multiple meanings Lee’s paintings reflect the world through objects and animals, creating a mirror of our circumstances that defies a concrete definition. Satirically titled In Line To the Throne, Lee paints an interplay between ambiguity and contradiction, layering meanings and interpretations onto their canvases.
Using the animal – beings that always contain an element of ‘unknowability’ – In Line to the Throne toys, perhaps, with our notions of success, excess, or even greed. The crocodylia order existed long before mankind, almost unaltered by changing climates, eras, and evolution, existing in harmony with the many worlds around them. What then happens when humankind is introduced? When we’ve created a final point of evolution, a desired form of the crocodile, which requires their demise?
Writhing below this ‘ideal’, a bag fashioned from their own skin, the crocodiles gaze upwards towards this pedestalised purse in contemplation. Perhaps they recognise that the form in which they can be accepted required a killing of their agency, their own ‘self’, or perhaps they look with disdain upon the industry that looks at their infancy and thinks of how they can be moulded and changed. A singular meaning to In Line to the Throne is ungraspable, imbuing their paintings with both a feeling of transience and ironic humour as the viewer peels apart each layer of Lee’s painting.
As with In Line for the Throne, Lee’s paintings cross the border of word and image, with each name prompting the viewer to look again, to see if the story they’ve settled on is the only one depicted—the only one knowable. With their compositions continually defying absolute understanding, Lee weaves mythologies, connections, and the human experience into their poignant paintings. Defying comprehension, Lee’s pieces move past one’s intellectual understanding and instead capture a resonant feeling between the objects and animals depicted on their canvases and our own experiences
(By Teddy Woods)