Maggie Lee, Unique Boutique (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings
Artist Maggie Lee’s work functions on complex twists of both memories and their embellishment. Frequently approaching her works as both the material of her past and their continued presence and importance in the present, Lee’s pieces dwell on constructions of culture through materials and experiences simultaneously. For her latest show, open this month at Reena Spaulings and Gaga’s shared Los Angeles space, the artist continues this mode of practice, her delving deep into clothing as both container and surface for a range of associations and meanings.
Maggie Lee, Unique Boutique (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings
The show centers in particular on the artist’s recent travel to Alto Hospicio, Tarapacá, Chile, the driest desert on the planet, where a massive dumping ground of unsold clothing exists, a location where thousands upon thousands of tons of garments are shipped and dumped as part of a global chain of shopping and consumption that produces toxic materials and massive waste. Yet rather than dwell on the less savory aspects of the site, Lee here turns it into a generative program, plucking, quite literally, a range of goods from the trashbin of fashion history, and using them to furnish her show. Clothing is covered in slogans, patches, and paint, and arranged throughout the gallery in a number of different modes of display. The fashions themselves mirror this fascination with the past that pervades so much of the artist’s work, signifiers of mall shopping trips and youth culture that seem held between a modern consciousness and something lost to the near past. There’s something familiar to those of us who lived through the late aughts, a conspicuously present range of styles and cuts that here serve as a canvas for the artist’s gestures.
Maggie Lee, Unique Boutique (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings
Maggie Lee, Unique Boutique (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings
These modes of work are echoed in a series of collaged works on the walls of the gallery, combining fabric and paper with polaroid photos, paint and other materials into scrapbooked compositions. Reflections of the clothing hung nearby, they bear similar gestures and brushstrokes, yet equally put forth faces and bodies, distinct memories that seem to echo the absent figures who once wore the clothing nearby (or perhaps never did). These abstractions, built up into a sense of distance and absence, make for a striking meditation on memory, self and space.
The show closes February 4th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Maggie Lee: Unique Boutique [Exhibition Site]
