Sook-Yin Lee is a force to be reckoned with. She’s a musician, writer, director, actor, broadcaster, and visual and performance artist. I caught up with her while she was in town for the opening of her new photography exhibit We Are Light Rays and the one-night performance of her multimedia work How Can I Forget?
We’re seated in the exhibition: intimate, darkened and close “a strange space-room” as Lee describes it. On the wall is the photographic series; back-lit displays on light boxes that run in a line around the room. The effect of brightened images caught in a moment is reminiscent of a reel of film frozen in still-frame. The impression is no accident.
“I feel like this is a cinematic experience…I come in and I’m suddenly a part of the movie. So I think that’s what you were seeing. Instead of a static thing, there’s a continuum or flowing of energy.” There is no start or end to this narrative chain, and the juxtaposition framed in each image tells its own story.
“What we’re playing with here is a number of different collisions of expression. So none of these are posed. These are all images taken from real life but when I slammed disparate images together, to me they created a fictional narrative. So it’s strangely taking elements from reality and yet when you collide these images side by side they create something else altogether. I call them micro movies.”
Ultimately then it’s up to the individual viewer to find the story, to create the narrative.
“I do have personal stories for each one”, she explains.“But to me it’s a gift to be able to walk in and to challenge yourself in terms of bringing yourself to the art so you become part of the art. And you become the perceiver and storyteller.”
For Lee as the artist and as a subsequent viewer there is a very specific story.
“I first stumbled upon this phenomenon when I went to Vancouver; a couple years ago my sister was diagnosed with cancer… She’s a visual artist as well, she’s a beautiful creator and painter and we decided that really early on we came up with an art project where every day we put forward a question and responded to the question with a piece of art…And through this sort of art project I stumbled upon this sort of thing….I love to tell stories through pictures, and moving pictures and film and I found that I could satisfy that desire, that thing, by this process.”
Previewing the exhibit before our conversation, these images evoked for me the impression of memory: it felt like remembering a personal story despite knowing I hadn’t been present in the captured moments. No doubt I had been guided by the implied relationship between this cinematic installation and the performance piece How Can I Forget which explores memory and forgetting.
Sook-Yin Lee’s How Can I Forget? A multimedium dream
Lee says she did not make the connection between both pieces until it was pointed out to her and encouraged by curator Ola Wlusek who proposed bringing both works, together, to Ottawa.
“It was serendipitous,” says Wlusek when asked about the accomplishment. She first saw the performance at Rhubarb [festival] and then the exhibit at TIFF projections. Months later when Sook Yin was in town Wlusek approached her. “I knew she would be right to pair with the Dave Heath exhibit, to give a different gaze, male vs female, on photograph-taking. She accepted the invitation and during the year recorded nine songs that now run as part of the exhibition”.
Lee is very interested in the idea of progression: of identity and the idea of self and of works that transform over time. This openness to interpretation and change is manifest in the development of How Can I Forget which was created in collaboration with choreographer and performer Benjamin Kamino and musician and poet Adam Litovitz.
“I had been acting in a movie and I tend to really throw myself into roles… Which was very distressing after we wrapped because I came home and my real person, when I was confronted by the vestiges of who I am, felt completely alienated. So the realization I could forget who I was, was profound, and alarming and interesting…. I realized self is a fabrication. There’s really no self- it is always in flux. And we may identify ourselves by what we do, what our names are, but those are really just scraping at the surface. We’re much more of a continuum of that: we’re a much more crazy, much more complex entity. And I think that was the truth that I came upon through the experience and diving into the work.”
The exhibit We Are Light Rays will be on-view at the Ottawa Art Gallery September 20th 2013- January 26th 2014. The multimedia performance How Can I Forget? will take place at the University of Ottawa’s Academic Hall Theatre Friday September 20th 2013 at 7:30 p.m. General admission is $15 in advance and $20 at the door. Students $12 in advance, $10 at the door. For advance tickets visit http://www.ottawaartgallery.ca/content/how-can-i-forget-multimedia-dream
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