Touch and Go, Dionne Lee’s commissioned installation for the City of Berkeley’s Cube Space, curated by Leila Weefur, looks at the American landscape as a site of danger, survival, and inherited trauma.

Dionne Lee repurposes images from 1970s-90s wilderness survival manuals, rephotographing and printing them as large format collages that cover the street-visible gallery walls. Outdoor enthusiasts or former Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts may be familiar with such manuals, which now read as quaint, pre-Internet information sources. For others, the imagery and instructions feel like a foreign language – our minds and tongues stumble to speak and understand. Blown out landmarks and wilderness survival tools don’t meet their intended function as guides, but register as impotent, abstract forms. Lee’s layered compositions undermine the idea that landscape is innately knowable or neutral territory.

Exhibition review by Roula Seikaly

Safe passage through these wild places is not guaranteed.

Landscape and nature are not remote concepts in Lee’s work. She confronts them as unfiltered, dualistic hosts for current and inherited traumas that shape Black life. The darkened woods and bramble thickets that sheltered enslaved people as they sought freedom. Acres of abundant plantation fields that blossomed under their expertise and hard labor, only to enrich and embolden those who enslaved them. Leisure, and terror.

Lee’s absorbing metaphor deepens when she introduces touch. Without touch, humans languish and die. Young and old alike, our survival is gravely threatened if intimate contact is withheld. Touch is also death; a noose’s loop, a knee on the back of George Floyd’s neck, or to a lesser degree, a handshake in the middle of a viral pandemic.

Touch and Go includes two video installations in which a featureless hand hovers over an existing handprint, but never fills the outline. The careful movement suggests potential yet denied connection. The hands also suggest prehistoric cave paintings at locations including Chauvet and Sulawesi. The prehistoric human handprints demonstrate the primal need to be known, and to know our world, through haptic connection.

Touch and Go is on view at Cube Space through January 31st. It is the first of four Cube Space exhibitions curated by Leila Weefur that invite artists and viewers to engage their sense of touch through haptic memory.

Intrigued by Dionne’s work?
Check out THIS INTERVIEW with Strange Fire Collective
or see more of her work online in The Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2020
or watch the following video from our friends at Lightwork:

January 13 – March 7, 2020 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Gallery Talk: Thursday, January 30, 6pm Reception: Thursday, January 30, 5-7pm Oakland, California-based artist Dionne Lee employs video, collage, photography, and sculpture to explore American landscape and her place within its complex history. As an African American woman, she sees the natural world as both a place of refuge and tranquility, but also the location of racial violence, danger, and vulnerability. More broadly, her work acknowledges the terror of climate change, mass migration, and humanity’s ongoing drama of survival. Duality often surfaces in work where she notes that “two things can be true at once.” Lee often manipulates found imagery in the darkroom in a process both organic and intuitive. The exhibition contains many fragments of photographs from her many wilderness survival manuals and vintage color magazines offering majestic views of “the great outdoors.” The survival manuals offer detailed, step-by-step directions on building a lean-to or foraging for food and water. Lee has become adept at these skills herself, thus reclaiming her connection to the earth and salvaging nearly-lost ancestral skills and knowledge. As the earth continues to shift beneath our feet, Lee asks what determines survival: not just who has what, but who knows how. Lee’s darkroom practice has the same sense of intervention and disruption. With a forceful irreverence for the sacred silver gelatin printing process, she deconstructs photography itself. Lee draws with graphite directly on prints before and after she exposes them. She pulls negatives across the scanning bed to create painterly abstractions. She tears, crumples, solarizes, and double-exposes fragments of information, challenging both photography’s purpose and authorship along with any idealized and colonialist view of the earth. http://lg.ht/DionneLee — Dionne Lee, born in New York City and based in Oakland, received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at Aperture Foundation and the school of the International Center of Photography in New York City; and throughout the Bay Area including Aggregate Space, LAND AND SEA, Interface, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. In 2016 Dionne was awarded the Barclay Simpson Award and a Graduate Fellowship at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. In 2019 she was an artist in residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and a finalist for the SFMoMa SECA and San Francisco Artadia awards. She was Art Forum magazine’s Critic’s Pick in 2017 and 2019 and currently teaches photography at Stanford University and San Francisco Art Institute. http://dionneleestudio.com — Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media http://daylightblue.com Light Work http://lightwork.org Music: "Children By The Creek" by Chad Crouch

Traversing A Never-Neutral American Landscape