Site Unfolding (2023), a multi-channel video installation by Dionne Lee, uses images and constructions from the natural world to identify narratives that are ingrained without attribution for the underpinning of history and its timeline, the absence of an origin story being central to the visual calculus of the image. The specific sites referenced in Site Unfolding are left unnamed as a nod to the broadness of the landscape that makes up the United States and its intermingled and complex associations to the larger topics of ownership, of belonging and of visitorship, of direct human impact and impression upon the land, and of the co-opted heritage inspired by location.

For Site Unfolding Lee has included audio taken from the ground, both from natural processes such as the movement of water and wind, but also from human intervention such as the sound of a piece of metal being dragged across the packed, dry earth. An excerpt from Observations on the Ground, a poem written by Mary Ruefle, is repeated by Lee in various ways throughout the video.

Accompanying the exhibition and written for the occasion of Site Unfolding is the text,I Wonder if Waves Feel a Sense of Kinship According to How They Were Formed: A Cento, by Saretta Morgan.
— Source: Bibeau Kreuger
February 1 - March 16, 2024

The revolutionary scientific shifts in eighteenth-century Europe — particularly in biology and geology — were so profound that the ideas they produced have only been expanded upon down to the current day, not overturned. From this era, we inherited the practice of breaking up living things into “kingdoms,” “families,” and “species.” This led to the conviction that life is categorical, and that the categories can be imagined in terms of distance, that is, humans are “closer” to other apes and “farther” from stromatolites. We also learned to think of the planet as impossibly ancient, far surpassing any conceivable point of reference from a human vantage. Following this, the gap between living things and inanimate matter became a chasm, unbridgeable and beyond debate. Time became linear, constantly disappearing behind us and emerging again as we cut a path through it. This intellectual history was liberatory because it helped displace the Bible as the definitive source of information about nature. But it also ushered in a new orthodoxy that has oscillated between dismissiveness and brutality toward animist traditions and people who believe in the spiritual power and inherent value of the other-than-human world.
This exhibition brings together two artists whose photography and sculpture are scientifically heterodox. Dionne Lee and Sarah Rodriguez build upon twentieth-century art historical currents that engage with the natural world, but they also grapple on a philosophical level with the nearly 300-year-old tradition of instrumentalist environmental thought and positivist biology. In their work they challenge us to explore an alternative intellectual history in which human technology alone is no longer the arbiter of landscape art and in which nameless organisms exist that are neither alive nor dead. Both Lee and Rodriguez are keenly interested in what it means to inhabit a place, to engage with the non-human world, and to wrestle with the moral and aesthetic stalemate of the American West. They are part of a generation thinkers who have digested the critiques of scientific dogmatism, American territorialism, and artistic imperialism and have moved beyond the simple rebuttal stage of critique. Instead, they have begun to find inspiration beyond the pale in the uncertain spaces of unfathomable timescales and not-yet-evolved hybrids.
Dionne Lee’s photographs resist easy interpretation. For Lee, the studio and darkroom are not only creative spaces, but also sites of research into both the geologic record and the technology of photography. Her purpose in sorting and rearranging is to nurture new ways of looking and less prescribed ways of knowing, but also to explore meaning in abstraction. She sees a kinship between the fossilized remnants of ancient plants and photographic processes. In this view, fossils are the first photographs, nature’s self-documentation thatpreceded any human apparatus and that are fixed in the original medium—rock. And like fossilization, photographs encode a kind of preservation that is contingent, chemical, a revelation.
Through a range of physical gestures that include scanning and photocopying geology textbooks and field guides, cutting directly from them, applying both soft and hard pressure to the back of the paper to create lines in relief on its surface, gluing, bending, drawing, and erasing, Lee makes images that should be understood as single landscape photographs. But instead of representing actual, cartographically authorized places, these landscapes are meditations on the fleeting meaning of the land itself. They reach toward the aesthetics of fossils but do not mimic them. They call to mind topographic unevenness and marks upon the ground but do not add up to a functioning map. They strictly eschew horizon lines, further destabilizing traditional landscape photographic convention as well as our sense of scale. They are at once about the deep past, the tools humans use to touch and penetrate and measure the earth, and a possible deep future in which our own bodies have mineralized and become fossils themselves. You cannot extract positive identifications of the excerpted found photographs in these collages, nor can you itemize a definitive iconography. The logic of Enlightenment science and its aspirations to certainty are withheld. Instead, these photographs invite the viewer to find their balance amid spatial and temporal disorientation.
Sarah Rodriguez’s sculptures are studies in an imagined, horizontal evolutionary process. In this alternative ecology, beings connect with each other and change in ways that do not produce “higher” forms of life but rather move into the future having sloughed off the baggage of hierarchy and purity so embedded in traditional evolutionary theory. These works are made of aluminum which, in the second half of the twentieth century, became known as a quintessential industrial metal. This was thanks in large part to the unprecedented expansion of aluminum plants for military applications during the world wars. Its rustproofness, lightness, and durability lent aluminum its high modernist connotations, but this obscures its more primordial meaning. Unlike steel, the ubiquitous metal of capitalism, or bronze, the classic alloy of art history, aluminum is elemental, an unreducible, fundamental substrate of the known universe. In this way it is closer to stone than it is to high-technological fabrications. It is one of the most common elements in existence though it has no known biological function. This is particularly interesting because the baseline materials from which Rodriguez casts her sculptures are all organic forms. Rodriguez is a meticulous and ethical collector, selecting seedpods, shells, bones, and other plant and animal remains for their texture, weight, and line quality. These materials come from the disparate landscapes of Hawai’i and New Mexico, brought together under the auspices of their aesthetic qualities rather than political or ecological boundaries. The sculptures that result have a reliquary quality; the original biological matter has been completely burned away in the casting process, but their forms continue to exist in an altered state.
Fossils are often seen as the purview of grade school field trips to natural history museums and a hobby of “rockhounds,” but these lighthearted connotations obscure the profound and unsettling philosophical meaning of remnants from the deep past. Fossils are excerpts of bodies, but only in a fragmentary way; only the body parts susceptible to geologic recasting remain. In many cases, too, the fossil record memorializes beings whose kin have since vanished from existence; they are the ultimate memento mori. They are indications of life, but not life itself. In semiotic parlance, they are indexical, proof of a once animated being that has been inscribed, only partially, into rock. They record way; only the body parts susceptible to geologic recasting remain. In many cases, too, the fossil record memorializes beings whose kin have since vanished from existence; they are the ultimate memento mori. They are indications of life, but not life itself. In semiotic parlance, they are indexical, proof of a once animated being that has been inscribed, only partially, into rock. They record the deeply intimate relationships between the biotic and abiotic, the ephemeral and the near eternal, between movement and stasis.
The works in this exhibition share a fossil-like alchemy. The creatures represented in these collages and castings were once in motion but have now come to a standstill. These pieces are testaments to the range of movements living things possess, but they also record the movements of the artists’ own muscles in their acts of creation. The result is less a freezeframe of arrested motion than it is a study in diachrony, multiple timescales operating simultaneously in an echo of natural processes. In Lee’s Fault Condition 5, for instance, we see found, decontextualized fragments of geological artifacts arranged on darkened paper that her hands have bent so many times the photographic emulsion has fallen off along the creases. Lee’s photographs push the medium beyond its physical limits to find resonance with the land itself and the ways it has been inhabited, transformed, and defaced over eons. The unified form of Rodriguez’s Flow, swarm, follow, sprint obliterates traditional biological taxonomy. The exact species of the plants and animals from which these fragments were cast are intentionally obscured by machined cuts. Teeth sockets, the striations of wood, the veins of a leaf, and interrupted lengths of bone are unified by welded joints. And something else entirely emerges that is lightweight and monochrome and wild and that embodies an incomprehensible sentience.
I read these works as impartially prophetic. The more one contemplates, as these artists have, the ancient past, the interconnectedness of biological tissue and inorganic materials, and the complicity of art history in the dominant creed of western science, the more possible it becomes to imagine an unfathomably distant future and the creative practices to explore it. Rote classificatory schemes start to seem arbitrary. Hubris gives way to humility. Ground truth feels ever more elusive. And the unknown brings with it an openness, a fearlessness, and the deepest form of curiosity.
— Source: C. J. Alvarez, Tara Downs
October 20 - December 8, 2023

The work of Dionne Lee engages closely with photographic methodologies to pursue forms of knowledge counter to the imperialist assumptions that underlie the conventions of North American landscape photography. Central to Lee’s practice is the body’s experience of the world at a close distance, a scale that she privileges in her work as an access point for understanding the relationship between people and land.
In Ratios, displayed as a trio of photographs at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station and a series of successively darkening photocopies on CAG’s façade, Lee mutually implicates small rocks and her own hand as tools to measure each other. Invoking the practice in geological survey photographs to include small objects in frame to indicate scale, these works stage by proxy the relationship between human bodies and land, and the asymmetry of their impacts on one another.
— Source: Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver
May 26 - September 3, 2023

“Who is best positioned to survive?” This is Dionne Lee’s question, which abides throughout her work in photography, video, and collage. Probing the American landscape and outer space, she explores suppressed histories and underlying trauma. Her own hands are among the tools Lee uses to conduct her work, and they frequently appear as if to show the personal nature of her search.
In coming to spend time in the Chihuahuan Desert, Lee imagined her work would focus on the forces of erosion and extraction to show what is hidden, revealed, and taken from the land. Once at Chinati, however, her residency took on an impetus of its own. As she wrote in the handout at her open studio, “When I arrived in Marfa I experienced an immediate disorientation of scale and perception … how far away a mountain range was … one week feeling like three days, traveling exclusively by bike and on foot, and simply: Where … am … I?” To get her bearings, she started first looking for tools then creating them. In the process, she was drawn to the idea of a bad tool and what she could learn through misuse: “What good is a ruler in all this space?” The public library next door to her studio became a favorite place to conduct research and photocopy collage material.
Through the work she shared, three videos and a pair of sculptural “stages” designated by blue tarps, Lee explored how the body relates to deep time embedded in the land. On one tarp sat a bucket of natural indigo dye from whence emerged hefty pieces of knotted rope. The other stage operated almost like an archaeological site with an arrangement of objects—including coins, a camera, a rock with the shape of a hand traced on it, and wooden rulers painted over to turn them into more elemental scales of measure. Rediscovered in one of the videos, these objects animated a geological timescale with a sense of impending doom. In another video, the camera roved above the ground following the ghostly movements of a Y-stick, or divining rod, in the artist’s hands.
— Source: The Locker Plant / Chinati Foundation

Castings continues my interest in place, ancestral memory, and survival. Moving away from found images sourced from wilderness manuals and how-to’s, I look to the body, and the land itself, as primary sources. Through the camera, a tool that affirms the experience of witnessing, I engage with how the body holds and carves through its memories, such as the resilience of generations to thrive despite systematic barriers and harm inflicted on them. Following the shadow of a fallen tree branch turned divining rod, rotating the sedimentary joints of the body, and gazing into the eye of a dandelion or the black hole of a rock overturned; are all modes of research to consider the relationship between the self, the past, and the landscape in which they meet.
— Source: Et al. Gallery
February 26 - April 2, 2022

Through the use of photography, collage, and video Dionne Lee explores power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape. Understanding American soil as a site of trauma, Lee looks to larger historical narratives, such as the unfulfilled post-Civil War promise of 40 acres and a mule to newly freed Black people, as a touchstone for understanding how history acts as a system that determines the autonomy and resilience of people across time. Lee’s work considers the complications and dual legacies that exist within photographic representations of the American landscape that is often presented as a space of peak contentment and peace, despite being steeped in trauma and violence.
The artist considers her body a site of research as well. Hands often appear in her work, creating a tear through a scenic landscape, measuring the sky in search of the North Star, clearing leaves on the ground to form a fire bed, and other metaphoric gestures that speak to land as both refuge and danger. The artist describes these physical actions as creating portals, or a flattening of time, ruminating on the possibility that an ancestor may have held their own body similar in positions.
These works mostly pre-dates the pandemic. Initially, this work, Lee describes, was in a way to grapple with the repercussions of climate change and natural disasters of the elements: wind, fire, water, earth. All of which felt more immediate after the artist moved to California at the height of a historic drought and experienced the yearly wildfires of Northern California. An important question for Lee is: who is best positioned to survive? This question is always relevant when we consider the disparities within whose lives are most at risk from climate chaos, the pandemic, systems and historical structures meant to protect some and endanger others, and for those who experience survival as an active attempt made everyday.
Lee’s work consists of photographs made by the artist and those found in the pages of wilderness survival manuals. Silver gelatin prints of her photographs are collaged or juxtaposed with found images repurposed through the silver gelatin process.
Engaging in analog processes mirrors the nature of the survival skills Lee studies–they are physical, primal, and can be as instinctual as the act of collaging or the urge to capture a moment in time with a camera. The process of teaching oneself traditional wilderness survival is one that folds in on itself over and over, building one continuous investigation into how trauma informs the everyday, one’s ability to persist, and the resilience we all work to channel, retain, and hopefully feed back into the land where we rest.
— Source: Center for Fine Art Photography at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art
July 14 – September 19, 2021

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.
— Source: Humble Arts Foundation
– January 31, 2020

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.
— Source: Light Work
January 13 – March 7, 2020

Continuum: Aspen Mays + Dionne Lee is the second in a series of exhibitions that explores ideas of creative influence, mentorship, partnership, and collaboration in contemporary photography. The focus of this exhibition is a duo that first met as student and teacher, Aspen Mays and Dionne Lee. Mays is an internationally renowned photographer and Associate Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts. Lee was Mays’ graduate student at CCA and now lives and works in Oakland, CA.
— Source: Silver Eye Center for Photography
September 5 – October 26, 2019

Working in photography, collage, and video, Lee engages the complications and dual legacies within representations of the American landscape and considers the history of black bodies on American soil as a lens for examining her own relationship to nature.
For her exhibition at Interface, Running, rigging, wading, Lee will present several new photographs, a video, and a large, handmade rope - the artist’s first foray into sculpture. The work focuses on Lee’s personal relationship to water and its historical implications.
The layered and evocative photographs include images of water and floating bodies that have been transformed through collage, and repetitive copying and scanning, before reaching their final form as silver gelatin prints.
Lee’s new video piece depicts the artist traversing the landscape with dowsing rods - a type of divination tool used to locate ground water. Meanwhile, the handmade rope, which is nearly forty feet long, was made using a traditional rope making method found in a sailor’s handbook. Aesthetically and conceptually, the piece evokes a variety of associations including bondage and survival tactics.
Lee has produced a potent body of work for this exhibition rooted in history, personal trauma, rising oceans and inland drought, all ultimately grappling with water’s ability to simultaneously support and threaten life.
— Source: Interface Art Gallery
June 28 – August 4, 2019

Lane Meyer Projects is pleased to announce Green Grass, curated by Tatiana Mateus, featuring works by Dionne Lee and Sofía Córdova. The show features photographic images, collages, found objects, and video projections that unpack the double entendre of the title: the impact of capitalism on the natural environment. Progressing from Lee’s to Cordova’s works, the installation reframes biblical retellings of humankind’s birth, struggles and destruction in light of historical and contemporary events and their relationship to the climate crisis that threatens our existence.
Dionne Lee’s practice is grounded in a dialogue with current environmental and race issues through the use of found historical images. Her photographs are often sourced from nature magazines and books from the 1950s to the late 1970s—a time marked by the proliferation of idealized images of the natural world as well as heady explorations beyond our planet. Sofia Córdova’s work, on the other hand, uses a mixture of sci-fi and magical realism to imagine a dystopian future that comes as a result of our failure to address the current climate crisis under conditions of late capitalism.
The installation is announced by Cordova’s post-apocalyptic assemblage, ONE WINGED ANGEL, displayed in the outside vitrine, signaling the end of humankind. Inside the gallery, Lee’s TRESPASS IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WORD, an inkjet print, reminds us that we are all trespassers. The work can be understood to represent the original sin, wherein a hand tries to grab a piece of land resembling the moment Eve reaches out for the forbidden fruit.
The promised land is reimagined in Lee’s A TEST FOR 40 ACRES, a documentary photograph of an attempt (and its subsequent failure) to cover forty acres of land with an emergency blanket. The title is a direct reference to the 40 acres and a mule freed slaves were nominally granted during Reconstruction in effort to build their own economy and transition into freedom.
Just as Lee questions the history of land rights, two further works critique the politics of water. GULF, a photographic meditation on flooding, is a reference to the town of Princeville –one of the first established black communities in America, continuously inundated by water as a result of climate change. In this work, the artist questions who is protected in the face of natural disasters. Here we can make a parallel to Noah’s Ark in order to reflect on who is saved and who is sacrificed.
The inkjet print diptych, BREAKING THE FALL, shows a pair of nearly identical hands peeling back into linear descending forms an image of a waterfall. The work was inspired by the Dakota Act Pipeline (DAPL), a 1,172-mile-long underground oil pipeline that was projected to run from western North Dakota to southern Illinois. The pipeline was built in 2017 despite numerous protests amid concerns of water contamination. The title is a double reference to the impact on the environment that comes from satisfying our voracious desire for oil in the face of our ever-diminishing water supply.
The gridded stack of monitors marks our arrival in the present time and our introduction to the works of Sofia Córdova. THEY HELD DANCES ON THE GRAVES OF THOSE WHO DIED IN THE TERROR is a multi-channel video installation that reflects on the decline of the earth's flora and fauna. The audios rework Mariah Carey’s Fantasy and the Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love songs with Spanish words describing a world where dances are held on concrete slabs under a dying sun and human survivors are in constant peril. The stacked monitors resemble our current Tower of Babel, where people fail to communicate, rendering them incapable of addressing issues of climate change. With this work Córdova projects our precarious and contingent connection to the natural world.
Imagining a future post-apocalyptic world where humans fail to find a solution to the climate crisis we are currently facing, Córdova researched resilience of plants following nuclear events in order to imagine a landscape which through genetic mutation has grown immune to human destruction. CHERRY TREE OBSERVATION FEE (HOLIDAY IN FUKUSHIMA) is inspired by Miharu Takizakura, a thousand-year-old cherry tree which has been a site of pilgrimage for hundreds of years. Surviving the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear spill nearby, the tree is relatively unaffected and is expected to thrive despite the presence of radiation. The work consists of three parts: a cut-out of the tree’s silhouette from afar; an 1836 waka poem about what priest and poet Suetaka Kamo felt in its presence; and a meteor supposedly found nearby and whose own identity is now blended with the remains of the tree. Moreover, the different representations of the tree make us wonder which version would be considered a relic in the event of its extinction: potentially charging an entry fee for visitation, like Fukushima’s cherry tree site started doing in 2010 - another way our capitalist system monetizes worship.
But the main dystopian version of our future has to do with the lack of water. The nearby video, SIN AGUA, and the sculpture, A REGION OF SINGULAR LONELINESS, were created by Córdova during her residency in Phoenix, Arizona. Following the development of Hurricane Maria in her native Puerto Rico from afar, the work is a rumination on the inevitability of an environmental apocalypse. By combining videos from her life in Phoenix, with footage of the hurricane and historical footage of Native Americans, Cordova leads us to reflect on the contrast between an indigenous, organic way of life and the wasteful use of natural resources brought on by progress and economic development.
The last work on the exhibition is Córdova’s UNTITLED (VASE) which ironically features dried flowers stuck into an industrial pipe. The work suggests a genetic mutation forming a new organism that combines organic and industrial forms. In its miming of a flower vase, it stands as a symbol of mourning for the life as we once knew it.
Some of the works in the exhibition question how we behave as owners of the land we inhabit, while others make us wonder how long the extraction mentality of capitalism can actually last before an irreversible decline of natural landscape and wildlife. Taken together, the works in Green Grass highlight the issues that arise when humanity sees itself as something separate from nature, trying to control and explore it in the pursuit of economic power and the accumulation of wealth. Overall, these works invite us to think about our relationship to the natural environment—how we consume it as free resources to be owned, gifted, sold, and exploited.
— Source: Lane Meyer Projects
October 11 – November 12, 2019

CTRL+SHFT is pleased to present Touch Stone, an exhibition by Kirsten Brehmer and Dionne Lee. Through photography and video, Brehmer and Lee explore their own relationships to land and nature, and how such spaces can shape one’s understanding of their place in the wider world.
Touch Stone is an exhibition investigating how we understand our participation, position, sca le, and effect in our environments. The works explore the sublime experience of recognizing one’s scale to their surroundings while considering markers of place, everything from the gap between two trees to your shadow passing over a patch of poppies on your walk home.
Accompanying the exhibition is a reading and research room featuring text selections and work by invited artists: Alex Arzt, Angela Berry, and Nkiruka Oparah, whose works engage the natural world in relation to the self.
— Source: Mutual Art
April 5 – June 2, 2019

A solo exhibition by Dionne Lee, The Break Before the Swell presents a series of works by Oakland-based artist, Dionne Lee. With the works in this exhibition, Lee performs gestures of claim over her position within the American landscape. She is interested in the ways that our individual and collective cultural histories influence our contemporary relationship with and access to land, landscape, and power in the United States. While Lee’s work is inspired in part by the time she spends in wilderness areas and nature preserves around the Bay Area, her work is also informed by her ongoing research into the history of black bodies on American soil, posing questions around who willfully engages, thrives, and feels safe in the American landscape.
With the works in The Break Before the Swell, Lee explores histories of exclusion, inclusion, empowerment, and disempowerment that are embedded in representations of the American landscape.
— Source: Lightsource
June 8 – July 13, 2018

Site Unfolding: Bibeau Kreuger, New York, NY (2024)

Compression Index with Sarah M. Rodriguez: Tara Downs, New York, NY (2023)

Ratios: Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2023)

Stages: The Locker Plant / Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX (2022)

Castings: Et al. Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2022)

A Muscle Memory: Center for Fine Art Photography at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Fort Collins, CO (2021)

touch and go: Cube Space, Berkeley, CA (2020)

Trap and Lean-To: Light Work, Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery, Syracuse, NY (2020)

Continuum: Aspen Mays + Dionne Lee: Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA (2019)

Running, rigging, wading: Interface Art Gallery, Oakland, CA (2019)

Green Grass with Sophía Córdova: Lane Meyer Projects, Denver, CO (2019)

Touch Stone with Kirsten Brehmer: CTRL + SHFT Collective, Oakland, CA (2019)

The Break Before the Swell: Lightsource, San Francisco, CA (2018)