Huxley-Parlour are delighted to present Love and Theft, a new solo exhibition by Grace Lee. For their second solo exhibition with the gallery, the artist returns to a preoccupation with loss and control in a suite of new small-scale paintings which navigate thematic and conceptual tensions of the archive.
Weaving together cultural iconography with personal histories, images are lifted from books, manuals, film posters, advertisements, and photographs that are digitally collected before being collated and compounded, recontextualising them through juxtaposition and association. The result is a figurative likeness, but one characterised by a simplicity of pictorial information, tracing line, shape, and tone.
In this new body of work a persistent absence hints at a state beyond faces, objects, and narrative to the power and the mystery of suggestion, challenging the objectivity we might associate with an archival practice, particularly in the digital age. In Lee’s work the primacy of objectivity, what Hannah Turner, in her book Cataloguing Culture, derisively calls the “assumption of veracity and reverence for the possibilities of impartial, omniscient technologies”, is held in contrast to shadows and shapes that are more suggestions than objects, backgrounds to a more diaristic approach which, along with their small scale, strikes an almost confessional tone.
This is just one of the tensions discretely woven into the work’s conceptual fabric, which simultaneously draws out the fraught boundaries between public and private, preservation and domination, as well as questions of ownership, identity and desire. There’s a fetishistic quality to the two stylistically dissonant works that frame the installation, mirrored cinematic images of rifling hands that serve as a touchstone for an innate, and innately flawed, human impulse. As archivist Jenn Shapland writes in her essay Finders Keepers: “Acquire it, collect it, steal it, forward it, conserve it, preserve it, store it, house it, box it, hold it, wear it, but there’s just no keeping it.”
