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Photographs by Jin Lee are currently on view in the McAninch Arts Center through June.

My work for the past 10 years centered on exploring how we experience a place and the way it structures our thoughts and sense of belonging. Whether utilizing a panoramic format, a sequence of related images, or landscapes that include human presence, my work also seeks to reference and expand upon various traditions of landscape art, from Asian screen paintings, documentary photographs, to botanical drawings.

My goal is to make photographs of the natural world that are precise and accurate in the tradition of scientific illustrations and documentary photographs, but at the same time, create a paralleled dream-like world of images suspended between the real and the imagined. Like the artists of botanical drawings from 17-18th century, I want to gather physical descriptions of the natural worlds that can lead to a sense of discovery and wonder.

SMALL MOUNTAINS is a series of photographs of piles and mounds of salt and dirt found in construction and storage sites. I am interested in how these materials are shaped by human use as well as elements of weather and time. The project also explores ambiguity of scale in photographs, as well as a sense of accelerated geological time in the miniature mountain forms.

LAKE EFFECT series closely examines various states and moods of Lake Michigan through the seasons, from spring waves, winter trees, to ice formations along the shore. It is also a study of passage of time and fleeting transient beauty, of the ever-changing light, atmosphere, colors and textures of the water and the sky, which exist in a state of perpetual becoming.

I am interested in working with heroic and sublime subjects of landscape art, such as mountains and oceans, but exploring them within everyday situations and seen with a subjective and intimate view. My goal is to develop a sustained relationship and a connection to the place I live by paying attention to and photographing particular things over and over again. The photographs represent an exercise in seeing, honing perception to the sensuous reality of a constantly changing and dynamic natural world. They are records of walking, observing and meditating on the subject of nature, place and time, including seasonal, geological and photographic time. — Jin Lee

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