Jocelyn Lee: The Appearance of Things

The Appearance of Things attempts to access this tactile and optical experience and explores how we are enmeshed in an embodied and ephemeral world. All life, including our human form and being, passes through stages of birth, blossoming, and death.

Life occupies environments – it makes itself at home, and enacts an arc of existence on this stage, be it a pond, a forest, or a suburban home. Each image strives to celebrate a multitude of sensual bodies: animals, plants, and human beings. In many ways, the photographs are cabinets of wonder, echoing nineteenth century natural science’s fascination with the diversity of life.

The Appearance of Things represents nearly 10 years of work by Lee, and encompasses still life, portrait, and landscape photographs, as well as many images that fuse these genres. This mingling is partly what the work is about: creating a shift in perspective where a body (portrait) becomes a landscape; a still life becomes a portrait; and a landscape becomes a body.

Printed at large scale, the photographs beckon the viewer to a cinematic immersion in the image. The installation of the work as triptychs and diptychs juxtapose various bodies in divergent earthly environments and shift scale significantly across the images. The works are meant to engage the body of the viewer and become galaxies of their own through the use of space and the dilation and contraction of scale.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.