Tilting the Horizon
Due to current COVID-19 restrictions, there will be no opening function. Instead there will be a closing event with the dates being announced when level one is confirmed.
Part of the Auckland Festival of Photography
Jae Hoon Lee, Sunset - Kai Iwi, 2020, Chromira on matt, 1850 x 1200mm
Jae Hoon Lee’s Tilting the Horizon features new works made during his 2019-20 Tylee Cottage Residency awarded by the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui. It was here Lee utilised new drone photography techniques to document our landscape, techniques often implicated in surveillance, surveying, war, cinema and real estate.
A South Korean immigrant who lived in America before moving to Aotearoa, Lee’s images offer the unique perspective of an artist who views the landscapes and cultures of New Zealand from a position simultaneously inside and outside. His hybrid images reflect an identity in flux and the shifting vantage points of an artist always on the move. Lee’s mastery of digital assemblage produces seamless, compelling composites from a multitude of source photographs, and although the work typically hovers at the threshold of believability, several new artworks celebrate their apparent artifice. Oscillating between the real and imagined, Lee’s most recent work confidently tilts towards the latter.
Tilting the Horizon may evoke a sense of the liminal for some, even a feeling of vertigo. Lee’s treatment of photographic space and time reflect a project which at once creates new topologies and ways of seeing. His latest work suggests he is tilting more than the lens, but also the horizon of contemporary imaging and his own imagination.