MAIA RUTH LEE

Using translation as an apparatus, Lee transmutes her works between mediums, connecting themes of borders, community, and language, with embodiments of carriers, loss, and self-preservation through process and materials. Relocating to Salida, Colorado in 2020 influenced much of Lee’s recent work—the expanded space of her new setting is evident in the shifted work. Unraveled in order to be opened, layers of the Bondage Baggage serve as grids, atlases, maps, and readers. The impressions and tracings make way for Lee’s tender navigation of the contours and accumulations of a life.

Language as a mechanism in its ability and failure to shape and give account to experiences, memories, and emotions has been a major thread in Lee’s work, as for those whose lives are precarious and unrooted— maps, atlases, and banners become a device that calls to mind their life of movement, and often, loss. Lee’s use of india ink, with its reference to calligraphy, point to human compulsion for storytelling, mark making, and archiving. Rather than lingering in futility and loss, Lee’s work opens up a passage way, forging new lexicons that give form to lives of transience, their stories, beyond immediate and accepted forms of legibility and comprehension.

Maia Ruth Lee has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (CO), Francois Ghebaly Gallery (LA), and Jack Hanley Gallery (NY). Lee has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Aspen Art Museum (CO), 2019 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, Helena Anrather Gallery, CANADA gallery, Studio Museum 127, Salon 94 in New York, and Overduin & Co. Gallery, and Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles. Lee attended Hongik University in Seoul, and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. Lee was the recipient of the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann grant in 2017. Her work is held in the public collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Courtesy Tina Kim Gallery