Taming clouds is at the end of dreams
Sangmin Lee – 2023
Taming clouds is at the end of dreams is a meeting of imaginations—somewhere between architecture and ornamentation, lived experience and collective memory.
This exhibition draws from a collection of images/objects that consider the processes from studio, exhibition, storage, daily life, and beyond. Collapsible architecture is re/arranged with tangential objects to propose a constellation amid uncertainty. They are ecosystems unrooted. Still lives in transition, displaced, and arranged again seeking stillness. While their histories become lost in translation, in its place new stories emerge.
This recent body of work was developed with a making process using inexpensive home/construction materials such as drywall compound, rebar tie-wire, printer paper, detritus, and inkjet image transfers from a personal/collective digital archive. It allows me to create with an immediacy that is emotionally charged, physically expressive, and intuitively imaginative. Like memories, the resulting objects appear specific yet abstract, materially limited yet full of imaginative outcomes.
Photos by Chris Miner and Ryan Fitzgibbon
About the Artist
Sangmin Lee
I was born and raised in St. James Town (Toronto, Canada), one of the densest high-rise communities in North America. It is an offshoot of Towers in the Park, a model of modern dwellings invented by Le Corbusier. With thoughts of utopia, it was meant to accommodate large populations with little room else for infrastructure and ornamentation. Despite its shortcomings, St. James Town is now one of the most ethnically rich neighborhoods in Canada and is sometimes known as “the world within a block.”
Somewhere between these concrete enclosures and lived space, between drywall and parquet floor tiles, are the stories of cultural survival that centers my practice. Here, I look to process, the unfixed, the tangential, and beyond—to wander peripherally into the margins and towards expansive narratives.