ROCKLAND, ME.- The Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine, is presenting the exhibition Jocelyn Lee: The Appearance of Things, on view through October 14, 2018.

Representing nearly ten years of work by photographer Jocelyn Lee, The Appearance of Things encompasses still life, portrait, and landscape photographs, as well as many images that fuse these genres. This mingling is partly what the work is about: creating a shift in perspective where a body becomes a landscape; a still life becomes a portrait, and a landscape becomes a body.

Printed at large scale, the photographs beckon the viewer to a cinematic immersion in the image. The installation of the work as triptychs and diptychs juxtapose various bodies in divergent earthly environments and shift scale significantly across the images. The works are meant to engage the body of the viewer and become galaxies of their own through the use of space and the dilation and contraction of scale. “Lee’s images are born of nature,” writes Bill Roorbach in the exhibition catalog. “To walk into a room lit with her work is to look out at the universe itself…”

Throughout her work, Jocelyn Lee poignantly captures beauty and humanity’s fragile nature. Her images of the natural and constructed world explore the sensuality and materiality of the environments against which life’s events continually unfold. The New Yorker has described Lee’s work as “the very essence of transient beauty.”

Jocelyn Lee was born in Naples, Italy. She received her B.A. in philosophy and visual arts from Yale University, and her M.F.A in photography from Hunter College. In 2013 she received a NYFA Fellowship, and in 2001 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is represented by Pace MacGill Gallery in New York and Flatland Gallery in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In April 2018 she had a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at Huxley-Parlour gallery in London.

Lee’s first monograph nowhere but here was published by Steidl Publishers in 2010 with a forward by Sharon Olds. In 1996 DoubleTake Books and The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University published her work The Youngest Parents in collaboration with Robert Coles and John Moses.

Her works are in the collections of Maison Europeen de la Photographie, Paris, France; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Yale Museum of Art, New Haven, CT; The List Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, NC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; as well as in numerous private collections.

Her work has appeared in many national and international publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New YorkMagazine, Photo Raw (Helsinki, Finland), Snoeks (Germany), Real Simple, MORE Magazine, PDN, Allegra(The Netherlands), DoubleTake, The Hayden’s Ferry Review, Marie Claire(Taiwan), Harper’s, and others.

Lee taught photography at Princeton University from 2003-2012 and at Maine College of Art from 1993-2001. She has been a visiting artist at Yale University, Bowdoin College, Mass College of Art, and New York University.

A monograph on The Appearance of Things, with an essay by Bill Roorbach, and printed by Meridian Printing, accompanies the exhibition at CMCA.