Tim Lee

Following his inclusion in the group show I Really Should... July 2005, Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Tim Lee previewing on 6 April.

Following previous work that often used humor and slapstick comedy as a vehicle for comprehending specific moments in popular culture and art history, Tim Lee presents a series of new works that operate within the loose confines of an artistic-social laboratory/studio experiment in order to offer a complex inquiry into the connection between highly charged socio-political movements and their transformative impact on the artistic avant-garde. With sources ranging from Alexander Rodchenko, Ad Reinhardt, Bruce Nauman and Public Enemy, the artist combines the templates of varying artistic entities into one cohesive body of work – including video, photography, sculpture and painting – in order to glean a greater (or askance) knowledge of each.

In Party For Your Right To Fight, Public Enemy, 1988, the artist simultaneously re- visits the conventions of early video art as practiced by Bruce Nauman in the late sixties, and Public Enemy’s landmark hip-hop album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” from 1988. Lee’s two-channel video installation features the artist’s head reciting the rap lyrics of Public Enemy while flipped upside-down and spinning in both clockwise and counter-clockwise directions as the camera records the performance in a stationary position. By actively re-engaging the strategies of one artist while immersed in the vicissitudes of another, the combination of two autonomies – classical conceptual art and radical black empowerment – flattens both philosophies in order to gain a deeper understanding of each. Accompanying the video is a large-scale two-sided mirror that features the title of the song. With the text appearing in transparent type within the reflective mirror, the entire structure is turned, flipped-over and reversed sideways so that the words appear to be illegible, thereby formally upending the promise of a social revolution.