My name is Dion Lee. And I'm an artist. Originally from New York City. Currently living in Oakland, California. And I make photo-based work around my relationship with the natural world. I would say my relationship to the natural world kind of started when I was a kid. I grew up in New York City, which isn't where you would think of having access to green spaces. But I actually grew up in Harlem and else Roberta called history from Central Park. And they think that that change how I could imagine like nature or green spaces. Something else I learned about Central Park later in life. It was once called Seneca Village, which was a town of affluent black people who lived there. And then to make Central Park they removed them. And to me that was just a really interesting and poignant kind of piece of history. When I think about my relationship to those spaces. Personally, I've always felt a little uneasy and like nature or out in the Woods or whatever. I believe in ancestral trauma. And I believe that when you take into consideration the acts of violence have happened in such spaces against black bodies, it makes sense that that would feel uneasy. But at the same time, I often think about how those spaces were also refuge at the same time, it, specially when you think about people fleeing enslavement, traveling North, right? They had to make their way through the Woods. They had to understand the landscape in such an intimate way. And I think holding those two troops at once is just really interesting to me. And something that I think ground me and understanding. My relationship to those spaces, which is knowing that it can truly be a safe haven. But it is never probably almost never really safe. I got interested in survival skills for a couple of reasons. I mean one of them is that I have a lot of real paranoia and fear around like what's happening within the climate crisis an who is most affected by that. And I find them kind of funny in a way because we see these as like antiquated resources that we probably don't really need. Like why would we need to know how to start a fire from scratch? Why would we need to know how to find groundwater when we have all these technological tools that are supposed to be able to help us through anything? So in the North and True North pieces. That one is titled North and the other side of True North in my research and looking up like how to find the North star. I came across the fact there's actually two different North. There's the magnetic North, and True North. The difference is really slight. But to me that was interesting because I think about North as it's like aspirational direction or associated with freedom is associated with up, which is plus be positive. But the fact that there were technically two felt like this weird trick to me. Or it was just something that touched me in terms of how we perceive aspiration. And how we, which to me is tied to how we perceive and understand survival ones ability to survive, which is can think of being hinged on. Your ability to reach this Northern point in the Peace True North, which is a collage made from silver gelatin prints that I made in the dark room. One printer involves two of my hands, pinky out, then mouth and for middle three fingers down with both hands and the thumbs are touching. And what that's doing it is a motion to measure the sky. When you do that, if you were pointing to the end of the Big Dipper with one pinky, the other one should be pointing to the North Star. And this is something that, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere anywhere that should work. The body is a tool to navigate yourself. I'm thinking about the body as a compass. I think about people who were fleeing the South during enslavement. And how potentially my ancestors could have held their body in that same position to kind of find navigation. The print is also solarized, which is a process of pre-exposing your paper or during the development process. But it makes us like kind of silvery sheen which is also mimicked in the graphite. That's marked across the black space on the image. And the piece AA OK K, that was definitely a repetitive motion using this graphite stick that had just broken off because it dropped on the floor. And there's something about cutting them up. They just felt really free in terms of this, the process of making. And I think really speaks to the survival skills which may be outdated or really analog in their own way. So being in the dark room and using the graphite and mark making the way that I am it marries really well, I think with the topic at hand. Which is using your body and using analog systems too to create or to survive. In AA OK K, everything in the peace resembles letters to me. So from the part of AA OK K that's on the right, it looks like 2 As. But there like butterflies like reverse builder images, a fire making tool. So it's a knife, some sticks and some tinder that you would use to start your fire. In the process of making it a surprise me to have language appear. Because I was using I was writing on this prints just like of actual textiles finding in these wilderness survival books. But then they have the textures kind of appear on its own with this moment, like the work kind of just like speaking back to me. When I'm pairing images together I'm looking for things that are related. Obviously there is the just visual aspect of this. This looks like this. But then I've there's also when something doesn't look like that and what happens when you rub that up again something else. And what narrative can come from there. And I think that that's definitely in AA OK K because it's just like fire making tools in my hand. And then our rope, right? Things that maybe don't necessarily seem fully connected. But then when they're put together they actually still out a message. But then in something like True North, that's a collage of things are just desperate. They're in my studio on that I just kind of like pull together. But I am looking for things to talk back to each other. So is there is a mirroring that happens even if it's not explicitly visual. It could be a mirroring that's happening in the concept. I've always been interested in the relationship between landscape photography, and history and kind of an authorship. And who has historically captured these types of images and what those images were used for. So I think in taking some images that originally looked a little bit more ID like they might look weird after I've like messing up a little bit for my own purposes. I see it as kind of like a interjection into certain historical narrative. I also like to play with ideas around representation and truths. I like thinking that perhaps, there's a found image that's printed next image that I photographed. But maybe you don't know as a viewer which one I photographed and which one was found. And I kind of like that confusion, especially when it's also living in the same images like it is in AA OK K. That's a mix of images that I've taken, and ones that I found. There's a power in recognizing that we were even before coming to this country and even in the early days here we were the experts of the land here. It's like a hard to swallow. Its not all based in something good. Obviously if I do think there's something about reclaiming that power as a act of resilience, and as an act of resistance also.
