Maelee Lee, Feminine and Strong, Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos

Maelee Lee Feminine and Strong

Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos

(Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos is Ph.D. International Art Critic, Curator, and Professor in John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York.)

Maelee Lee's recent work comprises photography, video and sculptural installations in a post-minimalist style that embraces simplicity yet has multi-dimensional content. These media link Lee to the Post-minimalists who in their anti-formalist enterprise sought to redefine art adopting an anti-painting stance. video projection or sculpture Lee's focus remains conceptual as the real substance of her work. While Minimalists like Judd and Serra in their embrace of purist aesthetics declared painting dead for its inability to be a literal sculpture object without reference to the real world, Lee plays with space rendering it illusionistic thus is antithetical to their enterprise. They are literal objects of sculpture being photographs.

And it is precisely because of these references to the real world that Lee's photographs are not like the sterile silent cubes of the minimalists, but are warm and inviting. Lee has revitalized art by reintegrating it into life creating such sculptures as her Gold and Silver Pumps shown in conjunction with her photographs. The artist explores the visual process by creating perceptual ambiguity so that when looking at her installations one can never really be sure of their spatial relationship to their surroundings. This constant questioning of viewed space results in ambivalence that maintains retinal dynamics. So that, Lee's work cannot so easily be placed into any one particular category or style. Her purist rendering of space is like Judd's as is her multiplication of objects. Do these tendencies make Lee a Minimalist? And, Lee's engagement with spatial ambiguity relates her work to Op Art. One thing for sure, conceptually Lee is close to the minimalist So Le Witt who in 1965 wrote "the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work.... The idea becomes the machine that makes the art."

In conceptualism documenting the idea is crucial for only in conveying it to the viewer while reserving it for posterity can the transformation it seeks take place. Processing through the post-industrial media of photography Lee is provided with the means to document her ideas as part of the post-modernist enterprise. Lee salvages not only the artwork but also its "aura" as Walter Benjamin called the artwork's uniqueness, via sub-textual analysis and discourse.