Dinh Q. Lê, Monuments and Memorials
Dinh Q. Lê
Lonnie Holley, New Works on Paper
Lonnie Holley
Our current exhibitions on view through September include Dinh Q. Lê’s Monuments and Memorials, a new series of large-scale photo weavings that reflect on collective memory and architectural commemoration. Lê’s evocative photographic artworks combine interior and exterior pictures of Cambodian sites and pair the seemingly unresolvable, competing narratives of a country’s past and present.
Interlaced vertical and horizontal strips of documentary photographs juxtapose grandiose ancient Angkor temples with sparse interior rooms of the Tuol Sleng Museum and other memorial locations marred by the violence inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979). Warm, golden-hued pictorial tapestries belie the painful legacy of the empty torture rooms. The weaving process of the artist’s photographic constructions physically intertwine narratives to reiterate the dichotomous nature of cultural memory.
Dinh Q. Lê creates conceptually based multimedia work that reflects on the complex history of Vietnam, issues of war, displaced populations and how non-western cultures are depicted in western media. Exhibiting internationally for 25 years, Lê’s solo exhibition, The Journey is Return, was on view at the San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose, CA) in 2018-19. The Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan) presented a retrospective of his work in 2015. Lê’s work was shown in the 2013 Carnegie International (Pittsburgh, PA), dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, Germany), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), Kiev Biennial (Kiev, Ukraine), a Projects 93 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) and a critically acclaimed one-person exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. Lê’s work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Ford Foundation (New York, NY), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia) and the Zabludowicz Collection (London, England).
Also on view are Lonnie Holley’s atmospheric, dream-like painted works on paper that feature repeated, overlapping silhouettes and three-dimensional effects. Titled The Influence of Images, this new series of paintings were created during Holley’s artist-in-residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, NY in 2020. During his time there he made artworks layered with spray paint and acrylic, adding an immediacy to the imagery. Nested shapes appear to radiate and float in the cosmos amid a softly diffused palette of grays, pinks, blues, and yellows that emphasize their transformative, mystical quality.
Lonnie Holley is a sculptor, painter and musician who has been making multimedia artworks since the 1980s. His improvisational studio process incorporates found objects including natural elements and repurposed materials to create figurative and abstract imagery that commemorate places, people, and events. In 2021, Holley has solo exhibitions currently on view at the South Etna Montauk Foundation (Montauk, NY) and the Parrish Art Museum (Water Mill, NY). His work is also included in the group exhibition From The Limitations of Now at the Philbrook Museum of Art, (Tulsa, OK). An 18-minute musical film about the artist’s relationship to freedom in America, I Snuck off the Slave Ship, co-directed with Cyrus Moussavi, was shown at Sundance in 2019. Holley’s work is included in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY), Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL), High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), Milwaukee Museum of Art (Milwaukee, WI), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), among others. In 2006 Holley received the Joan Mitchell Fellowship. The artist lives and works in Atlanta, GA.