Katie Lee
Tool Things
6 - 22 December 2017
Often we don't really see things if they are useful – objects that are solid and stable and ready to hand. But what if things break or fall to pieces and only a section or a shard remains? Tool Things presents a tangle of objects, materials and remnants that shift and flip between whole and fragment, real and not real.
Katie Lee works with installation and sculptural form to explore the physical and psychological consequences of the built environment and our negotiations within it. Lee works with materials including wood, rubber, steel, interrupted space, light, video, performative gesture, repetition, resistance, elasticity and fixed form. These may be arranged sparsely to induce agoraphobic sensations, or at other times they exhaust the available space, making it airless and suffocating. These affects and sensations act as the husk for the political context of the work, for underneath sit larger questions about governance, control, the arrangement and restrictions of public space, of accepted architectural design, of legislation, and of dominance.
Katie Lee was born in Tasmania and lives and works in Melbourne. She is currently undertaking PhD from the Victorian College of the Arts, and holds a MA, and BA Hons (sculpture) from RMIT University. She has held solo exhibitions at Long Division Gallery, Sutton Gallery, Alaska Projects, West Space, Utopian Slumps, Studio 12 Gertrude Contemporary, Conical, First Site, The Other Side and Nha San (Hanoi). Lee has also exhibited in curated exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, CCP, Sarah Scout, Shepparton Art Museum, Anna Pappas Gallery, First Draft, Auckland University of Technology and Ryllega Gallery (Hanoi). Lee has been recipient of an Asialink residency in Jogjakarta, finalist in the NAB Private Wealth Award and Maddocks Art Prize and recipient of the Besen Award at Gertrude Contemporary.
