Jaye Rhee: Overlapping and Unfolding

CAAA is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Jaye Rhee, Overlapping and Unfolding.

Using video, sound, installation and photography, Rhee investigates the evasive nature of authentic desire by focusing on irreconcilable tension.

When the camera “captures” a space, it removes the third dimension of that space. The viewer can partially restore that lost space by believing in the 2D image that the camera constructs. But that is work done on the level of imagination and perception – the “original” space can never be regained. Loss and gain counterbalance each other and in so doing create a new visual space. Rhee’s work dances on this edge of 2D and 3D, inquiring after the interplay of perception, imagination, desire and belief.

As in many of her works, at the heart of her recent project The Flesh and the Book lies an irresolvable conflict; here it exists between physical dance and musical notes. The dancers perform within a “musical staff” made of five thick rubber bands that are suspended at different heights yet are equidistant from each other. A visual loss occurs when the two-dimensional music notes transition into the three-dimensional dance, and vice versa. As more notes are gained, more dancers are lost; the two must maintain a balanced yet opposed existence.

Yehuda E. Safran wrote of that work: “We follow with our eyes the movements and contours of things, this magical relation, this pact between them and us according to which we lend them our body in order that they inscribe upon it and give us their resemblance, this fold, this central cavity of the visible which is my vision, these two mirror arrangements of the seeing and the visible, the touching and the touched, form a closed bound system. We count on this system, which defines our vision and offers a constant style of visibility from which we cannot detach ourselves.”