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:

Traversing A Never-Neutral American Landscape