A place for every thing / and everything in its place
Jace Lee: BFA Thesis Show. May 3-7, 2021
The bodies of work shown are titled “Wheelworks” and “Puzzles.” The wheelworks refer to a series of drawings and pottery made on the potter’s wheel. I think about clay and ink in similar ways, in their immediacy and density. I think also about the materials’ ability to hold information and volume. For a pot, the information that is held in its walls and compressed into the surface gives it function. The drawings record information in an analogous process, functioning, in a way, as portraits of pots. The rotation of the potter’s wheel forces me to consider time and movement as a material component, and the two modes of working inform each other.
To create the “Puzzle” works, I painted and then cut up watercolor and acrylic abstract paintings into small squares. After generating hundreds of these cut paintings, I arranged them on a grid drawn on paper. I also invited collaborators to generate with this process, using my parameters and materials. To me, the primary function of this work is recording the logic behind the combination of simple parts. They are a portrait of decisions, or a portrait of an individual through their decisions.
Both bodies of work prioritize process-based methods of creating art. The same kind of logic that creates connections between parts in the “Puzzle” works also lead to the pairing of individual ink drawings and pots in the “Wheelworks.” I think about these activities as translations of information from one process or context to another, creating an aesthetic language and connection across disciplines and forms.