Opening Reception: Thursday June 23, 6-8 PM
Marlborough Chelsea is pleased to present Jennie Jieun Lee and Graham Collins’s exhibition, Viewing Room.
Jennie Lee’s work and Graham Collins’s work have in common is that you can see the process of its creation in the final product, the traces of all the materials and labor that went into making it … Nothing is hidden. Nothing lies. Nothing tries to hide the fact that somebody made it out of something else. The structure is completely exposed and the entire process is present in the finished thing, if finished is even the right word. Are we finished? Not while we are still alive.
This makes me think of the fact that Jennie and Graham also live with each other, share the same space and all kinds of useful objects, and even a cat actually, while each carrying on with his or her own work – eating, sleeping, talking, traveling together, but not working together. Until now. This exhibit is the first time they have collaborated on the work itself. And what immediately struck me about the project is that they have once again left the history of this work exposed, raw and there for all to see: parts by Jennie and parts by Graham.
So really it is the whole exhibit that is the collaborative work, and which fills this space called the Viewing Room. The name fits because it actually is a room they have built and filled and decorated and which we are invited to live in for a while, with them and the living things they’ve made for and out of each other and themselves. And of course that is what we are invited to view: The way two people work at living and have collaborated on a life.
— David Gordon
Image Credit: Jennie Jieun Lee & Graham Collins, Viewing Room (studio shot), Marlborough Chelsea
