On the loosely woven surface of Jute Jute, artist -based artist Jennifer J. Lee Paints photo -realistic scenes that explore the saturation of images in contemporary experience. The granted structure of the substance evokes associations with pixelated screens and playing with the relationship between digital and analogue representations of everyday objects.
Recent paintings, of which almost a dozen could be seen in the artist’s solo exhibition on Klaus von Nichtssagend Galleryemphasize a personal glimpse of nostalgia, a fascination for the action of looking, and apparently banal images transfigured into symbolic references and objects.
Lee’s paintings strongly contrast in contrast to the immediate satisfaction of scrolling through endless images, so that the speed is challenged with which we consume information. She describes her process as a form of “awake meditation and persistent observation”, in which digital pixels are translated into hand-painted brush strokes and stretch fabric to simulate screens.
The technical capacity of the artist to translate finite details into a relatively robust surface speaks until the time and attention needed to produce a single painting. Small on scale, her pieces of surprising interactions between the surfaces of the objects and the woven jute.
Denim, for example, has his own characteristic tissue, which in working as “acid jeans” seems to exist somehow in both harmony and opposition with the jute. Picturing a smooth object in “Security Mirror” is the challenge to make glass look while nodding at the grainness that we associate with CCTV images. And a bunch of footprints in sand suggest another kind of grain, the shadows and subtle colors seem to vibrate or flicker thanks to the low-thread count jute tissue.
Lee’s recent paintings throw back to Y2K, an era about the advantage of immense technological and social change such as personal computers, mobile phones and internet were more available, whereby the social media platforms that we still use today fall apart – although they first appeared.
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