069He observes, “The works’ divisions, disjunctions and
asymmetries seem to reflect something of how people
‘see’—through lenses of bias and imbalance, forgetting
and omitting information, selectively remembering and
so forth. Limiting the infinite and complex; containing
it despite every effort to speak to it. With this work
I aimed to express the ever-growing experience that is
being in the landscape, and I still have arrived at work
that is compartmentalizing the vastness and intricacy.”
He has also explored how we see in a series of paint-
ings of the very top of the peak of Grand Teton. “The
mountain is huge, beautiful, grand and reverential,”
he says. “I began with a series in plein air at sunrise,
closely cropped to the mountain’s peak. I took them
back to my studio and as I sat looking at them I real-
ized they had a funny composition. The peak became
banal when it was reduced down and decontextualized.
I began thinking about how our perceptual filters
might influence our view of the landscape as well as
our involvement in it.
“It occurred to me the mountain is timeless in scale
of humans, rising up, eroding. In these paintings this
force is reduced to a high school yearbook photo,” he
adds. The colors of the paintings are not observed
colors. He began breaking them down into the chro-
matic color spectrum and then began experimenting
with different color relationships and incorporating the
iconic colors of different brands like Nike, or the palette
in Andy Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe. “When
I’m hustling on location,” he says, “I’m immersed in
the felt sensation of weather and time and landscape
force. In the studio I can pull apart these visual things.
In Grand Teton – Berries and Cream, for instance, I was
working with textural paint of contrasting color against
a flat background.”
Lee, having been immersed in programs of land
use, continues that interest as he immerses himself
in the landscape—experiencing it visually and viscer-
ally, exploring how we see and respond to it. He also
explores “what we choose to monumentalize and deem
iconic, how our view and treatment of these places is
filtered by modern day media and consumer culture,
and the simple celebration of places that we can’t help
but respond with awe and wonder.”
In addition to the solo exhibition at William Havu
Gallery, he will have a solo exhibition, Weathervane,
at Altamira Fine Art in Scottsdale, Arizona, January 6
through 18, 2020.
MONUMENTALJIVAN LEE: MONUMENT
When: November 15-January 11, 2020
Where: William Havu Gallery, 1040 Cherokee Street, Denver, CO 80204
Information: (303) 893-2360, http://www.williamhavugallery.com4
Monument #8 – Sundown
storm (triptych), oil on
panel, 30 x 104"
5
Jivan Lee on location
making Monument #8 –
Sundown storm.
Photo by Ella Sophie,
http://www.ellasophie.com.