Tim Lee
08 September - 02 October 2010
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| © Tim Lee
Rust Never Sleeps, Neil Young, 1979, 2010 |
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TIM LEE
"Solo Quintet (1897-1979)"
September 8 - October 2, 2010
Lisson Gallery is proud to present Solo Quintet (1897-1979), a new
exhibition by Tim Lee. Working with photography, video, text and
sculpture, Lee continues to explore his interest in reconstructing and
re-imagining seminal moments in art history and popular culture. Often
treading the line of the absurd, Lee frequently uses humour as a vehicle
to decode specific moments in the lives of various individuals. Drawn
from disparate fields, these key figures include Glenn Gould, Buster
Keaton, Merce Cunningham, Stanley Kubrick and Neil Young.
In the works on show Lee suggestively inserts himself into key moments
in the history of his subjects’ lives. Using a combination of formal
strategies, that include cutting, multiplication, splitting and framing,
Lee unpicks our knowledge of these individuals, prompting us to
consider how the public persona for each is constructed. In doing so he
also proposes a relationship between these subjects and potential new
ways of reading public figures.
In the four channel video installation String Quartet, Op. 1, Glenn
Gould, 1955 Lee turns his attention to the year that the Canadian
pianist Glenn Gould recorded both his seminal recording of the Goldberg
Variations and published his first and only composition, written not for
solo piano, but for a string quartet. Appearing as the four musicians
playing the cello, viola and two violins in a performance that was
recorded note by note, Lee reflects on our limited awareness of him as a
composer while utilising innovative studio recording strategies that
Gould perfected later on in his life as a performer.
The disparities that exist in our understanding of Gould are also
explored in The Idea of North, Glenn Gould, 1967, a model of a proposed
monument that features a tall, narrow column upon which sits the
precariously balanced model of Gould leaning back in his famous chair.
Acting as a de facto directional compass with Gould’s head facing due
north, the monument alludes to his career as a broadcaster and his radio
program The Idea of North, a meditation on Northern Canada and its
people.
Untitled (Buster Keaton, 1897) depicts Lee as Buster Keaton falling down
a flight of stairs. Re-imagining the moment when Joseph Frank Keaton
earned the nickname ‘Buster’ from Harry Houdini after tumbling down the
stairs aged eighteen months and stoically shaking off the injury, Lee’s
film features multiple takes of Lee rolling up a staircase with each
frame later edited and sped up in reverse. Projected from a specialised
16mm film looper designed in a step formation, the resulting awkwardness
of Lee’s movements evokes the jerky, slapstick quality of Keaton’s
silent films in a never ending circuit.
Rust Never Sleeps, Neil Young, 1979 recreates the introduction of Neil
Young in the concert film of his live tour. With three 35mm slide
projectors—each colour-keyed in red, green and blue—casting the same
image, all three projections noisily converge spotlight-like to produce a
black and white still image of the artist sleeping on stage with a
guitar.
The exhibition also contains two photographic works, the first of which,
Untitled (Stanley Kubrick, 1945), replicates a portrait of Stanley
Kubrick taken in the mid-40s when he was just beginning his career as a
photojournalist. In the photograph, Lee, as Kubrick, appears to be
taking a self-portrait of himself in a mirror, an idea that runs counter
to our later understanding of the director as recluse. In the second
photograph Solo, Merce Cunningham, 1953, Lee appears as choreographer
Merce Cunningham during a solo performance, when the public’s perception
of modern dance was beginning to crystallise. The image, split and
combined into two parts, depicts an uncoordinated picture of an elegant
performance, with each part dividing the body in such a way that the
performer’s body appears relaxed and at ease in the top and tense and
strained below.
About the Artist
Born in Seoul, Korea in 1975, Tim Lee lives and works in Vancouver. In
2009-10, he was a DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin where his
exhibition runs concurrently at the DAAD Galerie and which features
String Quartet, Op. 1, Glenn Gould, 1955 as a commission. Lee has
recently been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery,
London; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Arthur Boskamp Foundation,
Hohenlockstedt and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San
Francisco, and his work is represented in public collections worldwide
including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of
Canada; Collection de Arte Contemporanea Fundacion, Madrid; Art Gallery
of Ontario, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Tate Modern, London.
www.lisson.co.uk |
