Located on the 2nd Floor as a part of Colorado in the Present Tense
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.
Ellen Bruss Senior Curator Miranda Lash discusses Maia Ruth Lee's exhibition in just 90 seconds.
Artist Maia Ruth Lee discusses the themes of her exhibition, the inadequacy of language to describe our present moment, her choice of accessible and unconventional materials, and the home video featured in her gallery.
Maia Ruth Lee is an artist and educator born in 1983 in Busan, South Korea. She received her BFA from Hong Kong Ik University, Seoul, Korea and attended Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Eli Ping Frances, New York and Jack Hanley Gallery, New York. Her works have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; CANADA gallery, New York; Studio Museum 127, New York; Salon 94, New York; Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles; and Parisian Laundry Gallery, Montreal. Lee was director of Wide Rainbow, a non-profit after-school art program from 2016 to 2020. She lives and works in Salida, Colorado.
![[Image description: Photo of a gallery wall in Maia Ruth Lee's MCA exhibition. Nine works on canvas line the wall with black silhouettes of clothing patterns. Overlaid on the photo is black and white text that reads "Workshop: Writing Through Grief with Maia Ruth Lee and Carolina Ebeid"]](/sites/default/files/inline-images/with%20Maia%20Ruth%20Lee%20and%20Carolina%20Ebeid.jpg)
Lighthouse Writers Workshop and MCA Denver partnered to create a two-part workshop with artist Maia Ruth Lee and poet Carolina Ebeid inspired by Maia’s work with asemic writing. Over the course of the two weeks, participants took a virtual tour of Maia’s exhibition The Language of Grief had the opportunity to create their own works inspired by Maia and Carolina.
