Press
"Jody Lee: Drawings"
GlassTire
Barry Whistler Gallery
Through April 28, 2001
Seeing Jody Lee's drawings in the wake of her sculpture work of the past few years adds a new
ripple to the ever-expanding waves of insight into this talented, if sometimes opaque, artist.
Last year, Lee hit Dallas with seemingly frail, but infinitely resonant, pipe-cleaner sculptures
of varying sizes in a series of group shows: from the small, wall-mounted forms in Barry Whistler's Pin
Ups to the human-sized cocoon-like shape in the University of Texas at Dallas' Substance
Abuse to the overpowering, towering presence in the University of Dallas' Plunge.
In Lee's hands, these deceptively delicate sculptures educed an odd, indecisive feeling, a
reaction further confounded by Lee's wry titles for them. They're undeniably captivating, but
you're often at a loss to explain what about them is so enthralling.
Her works on paper open a door that permits a better glimpse at the sharp machinations going
on in Lee's creative mind. In Whistler's back gallery space, 14 small, gouache-and-ink-on-paper
works detail where her ideas may have sprung. The drawings read like germinating seeds not
fully formed, but close enough to insinuate the larger themes to come. It's not that they're
incomplete; it's simply that they don't posses the sort of power that her larger, varnish-and-graphite-on-paper
works possess.
Fourteen of those intriguing works fill the main gallery space and demand your attention from
the moment you enter. They're spread over three walls, permitting you to move across the similarly
sized, rectangular works almost as if they were part of single series, though they date from
1997 to this year. All consist of thick-lined black shapes on the white background, deep and
black at the lines' center, and somewhat soft around the edges.
What's provocative about the arrangement is that it permits you to examine a large sample of
Lee's visual vocabulary at a single time. Looking at these works individually leads you to
believe that Lee is working in a contemporary abstract vein, more interested in the effect
of the gesture than the finality of form. It's a corollary to what her pipe-cleaner sculptures
elicited. In a group, however, recurring themes surface, and you start to realize her gestures
are less indebted to postwar American Abstract Expressionism painting than they are to a specific
consequence of it: what has become of figurative representation.
Furthermore, the dominant subject matter you start to glean is sexual, in the corporeal physicality
of gender. In some instances it's a figurative suggestion, as in The Lure, The
Call: Off-sides, and most explicitly in Soft Male Landing, where the inchoate
shapes are arguably phallic. In others it's a leitmotif merely hinted at, as in Learned
Anything?, where an arc next to a rounded morass doesn't in any way imply a female form,
but something about its mood instills it in the mind. These readings are keyed into marrying
Lee's forms with her titles and trying to divine what she may be intimating. And in that effort
lays a possible consequence of her work.
Lee's work is sensual, in its capacity to evoke sensory experiences that remind you of the ways
in which gender is constantly defined. And the realm of the "sensuous" has often
been the domain of female: the male owns the heavenly life of the mind, female the earthy body.
Especially in the contingencies of postwar American painting, male artists translated the tensions
of their contemporary lives into turbulent canvases of vibrant collisions of line and color,
but there has always been a cerebral dominance to it. The work of Pollock, Kline, Motherwell,
Gottlieb et al. always seems to hit you more in the head than the gut. Even de Kooning's 1953 Women series
is as much, if not more so, an intellectual response to the idea of woman than it is an abstract,
expressive way of representing the female form. It's no wonder that a fair share of female
artists in the 1960s, `70s, and `80s turned to performance, an endeavor in which they literally
used their bodies as canvases.
Along with a number of other contemporary women artists who are continuing in the paths swathed by Janine Antoni, Susan Rothenberg, and Elizabeth Murray, among others Lee's work explores the figurative via abstraction. It also makes a bid to reclaim a female that isn't necessarily equivalent to feminist vocabulary of the abstract. It's an endeavor pioneered by the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Eva Hesse, and many more, whose work and contributions have been overshadowed by the white, male, heterosexual, and urban connotations of "Abstract Expressionism" that have followed the critical discourse and cultural associations of the style since the 1950s. And if Lee's works on paper are any indication, her efforts are not being made in vain.
Bret McCabe
Bret McCabe lives in Dallas, Texas.