Through, the exhibit by Celine Lee for MO_Space, continued her elaborate ruminations on art and materiality. It asked the audience to wonder about the artifice of art, measure in asking if the way we represent the world around us in our art is truly as accurate as we deem it to be—or if our ever-evolving perspectives make such an attempt intolerable.
A series of twelve massive panels of needlework done on white Aida cloth, Celine Lee utilizes the space of the gallery to create a giant wave-like pattern, seemingly crashing up and down as it sought to portray the different physics dynamics of space and time.
It’s also arranged in such a way that it looks like a giant film strip; one can imagine these running through quickly and creating a moving visual. In the exhibit write-up, Jed Gregorio described it as a “curved panorama,” mimicking different frames of motion across the strip.
“Does the foundation itself quiver?” they wrote. “Is it a conscious body that sinks and squirms? From pain? If so, what is the affliction of reality? Why is it sick? […] Or is it, itself, incapable of moving, and is moved by something other?”
In the write-up of Through, Gregorio compared the work of Celine Lee to the anxieties of the philosopher Plato in thinking up the Allegory of the Cave. But Lee’s preoccupation is not being imprisoned in a world of shadows; rather she seemed to wonder just how far one can probe reality in such a limited environment.
“Plato had less of a soft spot for the cave dwellers,” Gregorio wrote. “He predicted that the unshackled’s return to the cave will not result in an enlightenment epidemic, but a rejection of truth.”
The exhibit, then, is Lee’s attempt of simulating the unsimulatable. The designs of the waves come from attempts to depict theories of undulating spacetime, for example. They look like waves in theory, but those come as representations of how that motion actually happens in the dimensional space they reside in.
So, Lee here is doing a representation of a simulation—creating layered questions of what’s actually real and what’s not.
Meanwhile, the use of needlework is deliberate as a way of adding another layer of simulation to the project. Waves that were rendered in a digital 3D software are now crafted through deliberate, physical means, becoming a new representation on a different sphere of ideas.
Needlework is different from theories and online simulation: it requires the precision and planning of physical work, adjusting to elements of our world like lighting, material density, physical limitations of the form, and possibly human error.
What did that add to the project as a whole? A knowledge of artistic interpretation; that even with supposedly perfect simulations of how our world works, translating that in a physical, artistic medium means that the personal interpretations of the artist came into play to the work.
In Gregorio’s write-up, he explained that the way Lee crafted the dynamic, multi-pronged approach of the artwork was like seeing the way a painter’s sketches and studies differed from the final product: how the small details are translated in the medium itself, in a way that people will understand the emotional resonance being telegraphed by the artist.
The work of Celine Lee here showcases that process at work: translating mathematics in a modeled simulation, and then into a physical, realized needlework interpreted by the artist. Through forced people looking at the artwork to realize just how much of our perspective of the world is based on interpretation, and finding out what that means for us as people in general.
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