Currents
Cushion Works, San Francisco, CA
June 28 – August 10, 2024

Currents furthers the artist’s landscape interventions, and tracks the relationship between the recording and interpretation of place, and how the former often informs the latter. The exhibition consists of silver gelatin photographs and works in video.

Lee’s “rock drawings” are ephemeral inscriptions on stone that incorporate materials including chalk, graphite, and rope. A new suite of photographs primarily features drawings rendered on rock with water, and intentionally explores impermanent marking strategies, limits the number of tools brought to bear on an existing landscape, and aims to apply a non-invasive technology to her contemporary petroglyphs.

The photographs share a visual vocabulary with the downward gaze of archaeological images, though in their personal and ritualistic approach more accurately address an unclassifiable field of knowledge beyond a discrete subject or site.

Currents features three news works in video that effectively set drawings in time. One depicts a spiral holding its form as it floats downstream. In another, the recurring dowsing rod in Lee’s work appears as a shadow that spins and spins, like a scrambled sundial. In the third, content is abstracted to a blur.

Currents addresses not only the flow of water implicated in the artist’s work, but also the transmission of energy between transmitter and receiver, place and body.

Press:
KQED: “Dionne Lee’s ‘Currents’ Offers a Taste of Searching Without a Destination” by Max Blue