The first time you encounter Mire Lee’s artwork your mind might race toward an unsettling observation that eludes your memory, perhaps from William Burroughs’s Cities of the Red Night (1981), Robert Smithson’s essay, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (Artforum, 1966), or Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), or a scene from the film Alien (1979) or a “B” horror movie. These are just some of the associations the work elicited when I visited the artist’s debut exhibition, Mire Lee: Carriers at Tina Kim Gallery (September 15–October 22, 2022). But, more importantly, the work soon took over, obliterating these connections, and I found myself sitting and staring, not knowing exactly what I was looking at. That inability to quite contain the work within a pre-existing category or definition is very much part of its challenge and meaning.

The first gallery contains hollow concrete objects that resemble elongated pods with an opening or a cluster of spine or hollow rib-like forms, a short video of a woman, first outside with her bicycle and later puttering in the kitchen, and three distressed nettings hanging from metal rods. None of these prepared me for what was in the second gallery, even though I knew there would be a machine, dripping liquids, and entrail- like forms from seeing reproductions and short clips of Lee’s kinetic work. I suspected that the woman in the video — who happens to be the artist’s mother — is central to the entire exhibition, but in no obvious way. The open forms, or concrete shells, and the nettings fall under the definition of “carrier,” as a means of carrying something, but that still does not explain the feelings that surfaced as I engaged with the installation in the second gallery.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.