Michael Lee: Halves and Holes

EXHIBITION DATES: February 4 - March 1, 2025

RECEPTION: Thursday, February 6, 5 - 8 pm

poetry event & closing RECEPTION: saturday, march 1, 4 - 6 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Halves and Holes, a solo exhibition of paper-based works by Michael Aaron Lee in the Project Room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, February 4, and runs through March 1, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, February 6, from 5 to 8 pm, and a closing reception will occur on Saturday, March 1, 2025, from 4 to 6 pm.

Comprised of eight wall-mounted, low-relief sculptures and one drawing, the works in the exhibition were made from 2019 to 2024 and reveal the artist's ongoing fascination with the slippery divide between art and craft as well as abstraction and narrative. Borrowing patterns and pictorial forms from decorative art and folk traditions, the pieces often resemble picture frames, badges or emblems those things that help memorialize, commemorate or signify a particular allegiance. Ancient human forms such as masks and altars mingle with poker card and advertising imagery, Morse code, and classic pop song lyrics. Physical portals and windows in the works are frequently constructed as pairs, mimicking both the symmetry of our own faces as well as the instruments used to see far beyond them.

Both the three-dimensional paper pieces and drawings owe a debt to American Tramp Art frames from the late Victorian era. Whittled from recycled cigar box wood, these works were multi-layered showpieces that displayed family photographs. Lee's earliest constructions echoed much of the look of the original frames but crucially substituted paper for wood and left the photo "windows" empty. More fragile, entirely covered with graphite, and absent a photograph at their centers, the objects themselves had to convey a missing narrative. Subsequent works complicated the symbolic reading of the artist's subject by replacing the standard rectangular or oval photo window with grillwork, keyholes, mazes even tracings of the artist's hands and feet. The most recent works in this exhibition include such things as tiny mirrors and found objects. With their dark, near-monochrome surfaces and static compositions, these works are unabashedly funerary, often tracking personal loss as well as alluding to larger cultural and political rifts. It is no coincidence that Lee began this body of work during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and continues to see its relevance in our unsettling present moment. Still, he has always sought to manifest a far deeper sense of time and mystery in his art, beating back pessimism through imbuing the works with a blend of spirituality and surrealist humor.

Michael Aaron Lee (born 1972, Cincinnati, OH) is a New York City based artist. He received a BFA from the University of Texas, Austin and an MFA from Hunter College, New York City. Lee has had solo exhibitions at Nightshift Gallery (Brooklyn) and Hudson County Community College’s Dineen Hull Gallery (Jersey City, NJ), and has been included in group exhibitions at Ulterior, Jason McCoy, and Calico galleries in New York City, the Museum of Drawing in Laholm Sweden, and the Luo Zhongli Art Museum at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China among others. His work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint and mentioned in Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, Bomb Magazine, the Huffington Post, and The Austin Chronicle, among others. Lee was awarded residencies at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and The Cooper Union and received an artist support grant in 2023 from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. The artist is an adjunct professor at Hudson County Community College and Montclair State University (New Jersey). In addition to teaching and making art, Lee has sought to build community and foster dialogue among New York area artists through the creation of The Artist Lecture Series and most recently Show & Tell.