Notes from "mothpavillion” series, Joseph Lee

This body of work stems from the immediacy of the cursive mark, when repeated over and over sits graphically in a formless space.  The calligraphic gestures create a visual pulse mimicking various rhythms which provides a foundation for the works on paper. Collaged geometrical shapes are set upon as a “secondary track” or counterpoint.  The resulting tessellation tempers various areas, creating paths which sometimes run congruent and/or clash creating tension. An abrupt syncopation shifts the patterning while connoting a truncated, graphically abstract message.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland*

by Julie Joyce, Gallery Director, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A.

Ancient Chinese landscape painting, from the majestic Sung Dynasty to the more unorthodox masters of the late Yuan and later Ming Dynasties, are the inspiration for Jacci Den Hartog's plaster and polyurethane sculptures. Realizing in three dimensional form her recollections of Chinese art, decoration, and gardens (she traveled to China twice in the past five years), the artist has developed, like the most famous of the Literati painters, an idiosyncratic vocabulary of image and form that speaks to both the personal and universal. In Den Hartog's wall sculpture Traveling with my Heart Above My Head (1997), rocky crags geologically accumulated over centuries float serenely above a sinuous stream and intricately stylized, turbulent wave crests that also read as heavenly clouds. The overall effect is much like the apparition of vistas and peaks through dense valley mist in the grandest of hanging scrolls. Den Hartog's recent Pavilion series--plaster pedestal works actualizing fantastic, focus-defying and energy infused imagery--recall landscapes by the Late Yuan painter Wang Meng (c. 1309-1385) and yet also the much later German Surrealist painter Max Earnst (1891-1976). While her work takes its cue from such stimulating histories, it more importantly points to weighty contemporary issues, such as the relationship between the natural and unnatural;[4] as well as the role we and our imaginations play in the classification and preservation of each.

Employing movie posters, event fliers and product ads for his canvases, Joseph Lee overlays these predetermined arrangements of text and photographic image with the particulars of his own idiomatic language. Intricate swirls, clusters and geometries of painted marks and dabs much like the colorful decorative motifs found in art and design of Southeast Asia are methodically overlaid on familiar American retail icons. Whimsical and ornate, Lee's hand rendered patterns also fuse into dense patches, in some works transforming into super-sized pixilated text. Like his delicate designs, the artist's encroaching words add deeper yet at the same time more obscure layers of meaning to the original commodity peaking through. Here Lee provides an updated and distinctively West Coast type of Pop. Yet appropriating elements of his Thai heritage just as freely as he does the kitschy ephemera of B movies and designer ad campaigns, Lee endeavors to coincidentally enhance and challenge the wonderful frivolity of it all. 

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa367.htm

http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jun/15/entertainment/ca-10615

Reconstruct: Bryan Bankston, Julia Elsas, Joseph Lee, and Liz Steketee

SHANA NYS DAMBROT | MARCH 18, 2014 | 4:00AM

The majority of the contemporary art galleries in the Pacific Design Center have recently moved on to greener (aka more affordable) pastures, but the ones that are left are pretty good. Young Projects Gallery is still showing the best video-art program in the city, and the Art Merge Lab isn't slowing down, either, opening a new group exhibition this week that explores how artists who are not necessarily photographers yet use photography as the foundation of their work. "Reconstruct: Bryan Bankston, Julia Elsas, Joseph Lee, and Liz Steketee" brings together a set of such artists, whose works of portraiture blow straight past likeness and delve deep into the more ambiguous territory of private and collective memory, history and commerce, document and fiction. Though the works in the show deploy digital media, painting, collage and other visual strategies, they all start with photographs - family pictures, fashion spreads, vintage prints, and digital streams. Whether by accentuating or blotting out, exaggerating, inventing, or redacting aspects of the depicted figures, each of these artists finds a unique way to examine how images of identity are literally constructed from an amalgam of experiences. Art Merge Lab, Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., B257, W. Hlywd.; Tue.-Fri., noon-5 p.m., through May 16. (310) 913-1133, artmergelab.com. 
Tuesdays-Fridays. Starts: March 18. Continues through May 16, 2014