Maia Ruth Lee

Opening: Friday, June 13, 6 PM

Artist Reception: Sunday, June 15, 11 AM

Exhibition: June 13 – August 9, 2025

"My work explores the evolving shape of language, memory, and identity in 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, I’ve developed a visual language that seeks to reconcile the dislocation and fluidity of cross-cultural experience. Art, for me, becomes both a map and a memory—charting the spaces between origin and destination, between the spoken and the unspeakable. 

Through painting, sculpture, installation, and photographic work, I reflect on how stories are stored, transported, lost, or transformed. I’m drawn to utilitarian materials often associated with migration—tarps, ropes, bags, textiles—objects that carry lives across borders, and also carry their own narratives of labor, survival, and adaptation. These materials become metaphors for containment and release: how we carry our identities, and how they change under pressure. 

Language is central to my practice—not only in its spoken or written form but in its material and symbolic possibilities. Grids, codes, alphabets, and abstracted symbols appear frequently in my work, forming a personal lexicon that resists fixed interpretation. I am interested in how systems of communication both empower and confine, and in the slippages that occur when translation becomes necessary. 

In recent years, my relocation from the urban density of New York to the expansive landscapes of Colorado has shifted my perspective and my palette. Nature has reentered my work—not as a return to some imagined origin, but as a way to reconsider scale, silence, and the structures we impose upon the organic. The vastness of the American West offers a new lens through which I view fragmentation and wholeness, emptiness and saturation. 

Ultimately, I see my work as a process of reassembly—of piecing together fragments of culture, history, and identity to form new ways of seeing. I am guided by the belief that the personal is inherently political, and that within the aesthetics of displacement lies the potential for both resilience and reimagination."

Maia Ruth Lee