About the Exhibition

Maia Ruth Lee explores the failure of language to express fully and accurately the meaning of an emotion or an experience. Lee relocated to Colorado in spring 2020, and her work reflects on the events of the year and the profundity of change that they have wrought. Paintings, wall-based installations, works on paper, and a video present an acutely tender response to the upheaval and loss of the last year. Creatively prolific, this exhibition comprises entirely new work borne of a central yet impossible pursuit: to lean on language, both written and oral, to capture the artist’s personal experiences and also to approximate the experiences of others.

Her turn to asemic writing — text that is visually seen, but which has no context — is in part a recognition of the impossibility of this effort. In doing so, Lee opens language up, disentangles it from meaning, and allows for this orphaned text to be treated as visual object as much a linguistic concept. Embedded in the incoherence of asemic writing is that it simply cannot be reduced or codified; much like the emotional range experienced by many over the past year,  neither can we. Ultimately, Lee’s project explores nor just the stubbornness of text to be read, but also the illegibility of our experiences to be decoded as language.

Click here to reserve your tickets to see the exhibition (along with the other shows on view)!