Maia Ruth Lee
Maia Ruth Lee's work explores the evolving shape of language, memory, and identity within the context of migration, diaspora, and personal mythology. Born in South Korea, raised in Nepal, and having lived in cities as varied as New York and Salida, Colorado, she has developed a visual language that seeks to reconcile the dislocation and fluidity of cross-cultural experience. Her practice spans photography, video, painting, and sculpture, and investigates lives shaped by precarity and a state of un-rootedness—maps, atlases, and banners become devices that call to mind a life of movement, and often, loss. Using translation as an apparatus, Lee transmutes her works between mediums, connecting themes of borders, community, and language with embodiments of carriers and self-preservation through process and materials. Lee’s work opens up a passageway, forging new lexicons that give form to lives of transience and their stories, beyond immediate and accepted forms of legibility and comprehension.
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acrylic ink on canvas
54.33 x 67.72 in (138 x 172 cm) -
acrylic ink on canvas
55.12 x 67.72 in (140 x 172 cm) -
acrylic ink on canvas
42.91 x 36.61 in (109 x 93 cm) -
acrylic ink on canvas
35.43 x 36.61 in (90 x 93 cm) -
acrylic ink on canvas
36.22 x 42.13 in (92 x 107 cm) -
acrylic ink on canvas
27.17 x 27.95 in (69 x 71 cm) -
tarp, rope, tape, used clothing, and bedding
28.35 x 22.05 in (72 x 56 cm) -
ink on canvas
60.63 x 59.45 in (154 x 151 cm) -
ink on canvas
28.74 x 28.74 in (73 x 73 cm)