To lose something is to keep it in a different form. In honor of
loss, Susie J. Lee makes art out of light, sound, water, and clear
acrylic, bleached of color and longing for a stable medium. Her show
Refrain is a half world. It is the half that has gone missing,
with disembodied words and sounds floating around in empty rooms, with
video projections passing through shaky water before they hit a screen.
It’s a miasma of unphotographable aftershocks, in which minds circle in
search of the original and the whole.
For Lee’s first solo show at Lawrimore Project—she was the
star of last year’s University of Washington master of fine arts
class—she wrote a song instead of an artist statement. Its lyrics
are soupy and romantic (“Can’t bring you with me/Have to let you go
again”), but they are not ironic. On the contrary: They lay out the
artist’s particular brand of anticool.
Her installations are balms. They are personal, intimate,
subjective, and emotional. When you are with them, you are alone.
Through the interplay of digital and physical elements—digital
drops falling on real water, for instance—they draw you into the
same kind of relationship they depict. Threadbare and tenuous, shot
through with the prospect of leaving.
After I left, what resounded most in my memory—even more than
the spectacle at the entrance, a flash lightning storm of tubed LED
lights falling to the floor like rain in a dark vast room—was a
work called Wachet Auf Ruft Uns Die Stimme.
In the middle of a dark room a dusky glow emanates from the top of a
tank of water like some holy cinematic spirit. The title is from a
doleful Bach cantata that Lee plays on the piano. Little more than a
year ago, Lee made her name on the strength of an editioned
installation. Snapped up by collectors and museums at Aqua Art Miami,
it also featured a Bach soundtrack and a video, of two burning strands
of twine, intertwining and unwinding like lovers. In the new work,
Wachet Auf Ruft Uns Die Stimme (literally, “wake up, the voice
calls to us,” which in turn invokes
T. S. Eliot’s “Till human
voices wake us, and we drown”), the video is of two injections of oil
that approach each other, swirl and mix in baroque patterns, and
dissipate. The action is projected upward from underneath the tank,
through the water, onto a screen hanging from the ceiling. That means
that the video appears in multiple incarnations: as a stable image on
the floor of the tank, as a flickering ghost between tank and screen,
and as a movie continuously acted upon by its filter, the water. Stomp
a foot or even walk lightly, and you change the film.
Seen from a certain angle, the pinpoint of light from the projector
appears on the screen in the middle of the diffuse oil, creating the
momentary illusion of being underwater and looking up at a blinding sun
in the clouds. Maybe it was an accident of technology. If so, it is a
lucky one, a visual trope that poignantly raises the issue of
cliché, a constant companion to the heavily land-mined territory
of emotional life where Lee works.
Overtly poetic texts are more distracting. The material simplicity
of a sculpture called Rings of Saint Genevieve is burdened by
sung lyrics from the Son Volt song “Tear-Stained Eye.” A wall sculpture
and video of a soft white surface with shapes moving under it is
accompanied by whispered lines from a Russell Edson poem heard in
headphones: “And he is kissing her pubis there… And his buttocks move
in and out of the wall.” I never want the linguistic construction
“buttocks move in and out” whispered into my ear ever again.
Buttocks aside, Lee is onto something. She already has articulated
her major themes, and the rest is editing. Refrain is a
maximal leap straight into love, loss, sex, death, cinema, spectacle,
poetry, sound, and serious technology, but it feels like everything
slipping through your fingers. 
