Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Dance, Dance, Dance, an exhibition of video installations based on drawings and prints by Kakyoung Lee. This will be Lee’s first solo show in New York City, and at Mary Ryan Gallery. Dance, Dance, Dance, is her most ambitious project to date. Lee’s methods... Read more
Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Dance, Dance, Dance, an exhibition of video installations based on drawings and prints by Kakyoung Lee. This will be Lee’s first solo show in New York City, and at Mary Ryan Gallery. Dance, Dance, Dance, is her most ambitious project to date. Lee’s methods are intentionally time-consuming. She employs repetitive, meticulous techniques, often making more than 100 prints or drawings per project, to translate her repetitious daily routine, what she calls “the monotonous daily ritual.” Through the exploration of these most basic aspects of her life Lee articulates her own identity.
Like much of Lee’s recent work, Dance, Dance, Dance, began as a performance of a mundane or everyday action. Lee documents this initial performance by filming herself with a video camera, and then using drypoint, she deconstructs her performance into single moments. These individual elements are then put back together using animation and the initial action is reconstructed. Through this process of deconstruction and reconstruction, new imagery emerges and Lee is able to subtly add to the history of her actions. Dance, Dance, Dance, depicts the artist dancing alone, as one might in their bedroom when they think no one is looking. The soundtrack was composed for this particular piece by Natacha Diels and the title was inspired by Haruki Murakami’s 1994 novel, also called Dance Dance Dance. The video will be shown along with 323 of 342 the prints used to create it.
Coffee Circle, a two-channel video of a drawing made using leftover coffee, will also be on view. Lee used the discarded coffee, which darkens over time, to create a circular drawing directly on a wall, which she then photographed to translate into a moving image. The two-channel production allows the viewer to see a detail of each individual figure on a separate smaller screen as it moves through the larger projection on the wall. Each figure in Coffee Circle is slightly different, and the work deals with the cyclical nature of life.
