Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Abbey

2020
Oil on jute
8 x 11 in / 20.3 x 20.5 cm

Abbey

2020
Side view

Sunflowers

2020
Oil on jute
10 x 10 in / 25.4 x 25.4 cm

Sunflowers

2020
Side view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Records

2020
Oil on jute
11 x 10 in / 27.9 x 25.4 cm

Records

2020
Side view

Savoy Cabbage

2020
Oil on jute
11 x 13 in / 27.9 x 33 cm

Savoy Cabbage

2020
Side view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Wallpaper

2020
Oil on jute
11 x 9 in / 27.9 x 22.9 cm

Wallpaper

2020
Side view

Cathedral

2020
Oil on jute
13 x 9 in / 33 x 22.9 cm

Cathedral

2020
Side view

Truck

2020
Oil on jute
10 x 11 in / 20.5 x 27.9 cm

Truck

2020
Side view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Crocodiles

2020
Oil on jute
9 x 14 in / 22.9 x 35.6 cm

Crocodiles

2020
Side view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Wallflowers

2020
Installation view

Elevator

2020
Oil on jute
13 x 10 in / 33.02 x 25.4 cm

Elevator

2020
Side view

Couch

2020
Oil on jute
11 x 13 in / 27.9 x 33 cm

Couch

2020
Side view

Security Mirror

2020
Oil on jute
12 x 10 in / 30.5 x 25.4 cm

Security Mirror

2020
Side view

September 12 – November 7, 2020
By appointment

 

Jennifer J. Lee’s diminutive and potent works survey the ways in which a painting might arrest, transform and materialize the image at its source. For Wallflowers, Lee’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, the artist has prepared eleven new paintings which will be on view at Château Shatto from September 12 through November 7, by appointment. 

Lee builds her paintings on jute, a fibrous material that poses more resistance and discontinuity than conventional linen or canvas. The resistance that this surface presents to oil paint and the fine tip of a brush emulates the corrupted transmission of information that takes place when a visual subject is surrendered to the representational space of a jpeg. A fuzziness is lifted from the brittle image and supplanted on the receptive texture of jute.

The enduring question of how painting reforms itself as the formats and appearances of images evolve is expressed in Lee’s work through a correspondence between circulated and attenuated digital images and the artist’s material choices, which lend themselves to enacting both the visualization and the degradation at play in this process of transference. A symmetry emerges between the approximation performed by the digital image and the approximation performed by painting. 

Seeking her subjects, Lee plucks itinerant images from circulation and presents them as non-sequiturs, the prevailing arrangement of visual feeds produced by algorithmic media. The relations between the subjects in this grouping of works are elastic: there are moments of proximity, mostly in shared compositional qualities and optical effects, but there is also a deliberate range. A textured concave object in one painting is counterbalanced by a smooth and reflective convex object in another. Several works are composed from crops of images that are representational, yet the insistent patterning that furnishes the objects or repetition that provides their structure tilts the painting towards a vibrational abstraction. Throughout Wallflowers, there is a rousing reciprocity between content and form and one experiences these paintings in the indeterminable space between the two. 

Jennifer J. Lee (born 1977) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design. In 2009, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Cold Turkey, La Maison de Rendez-Vous with lulu, Brussels; Day Trip, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York; and Nowhere, Pressure Club, Philadelphia. Selected group exhibitions include, A Cloth Over a Birdcage, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles; Last Night I Wore a Costume, curated by Lisa Cooley, LX Gallery, New York; The Views – Paintings of Windows, Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn.  

For inquiries, please contact gallery@chateaushatto.com. Appointments to view the exhibition can be made on the contact page of the gallery website. Appointments are one hour in duration, can include up to four guests and require masks to be worn at all times.