LONDON.- Camden Arts Centre presents a solo exhibition of new work by Dutch artist Jennifer Tee. Combining sculpture, installation, performance and collage, Let It Come Down continues Tee’s ongoing process of negotiation between material experimentation and philosophical practice.
Often working with charged cultural artefacts and symbols, Tee instigates dialogues between Eastern philosophies and Western culture. Embracing their duality, works hover between their concrete form and their laden esoteric meaning, reflecting the intrinsic contradictions that surround us: the rational and the irrational; the informed and the unconscious; belief and scepticism; spirit and matter.
The title of the exhibition, Let It Come Down, reflects how worldly events outside of personal control weigh on the artist’s everyday life and thought processes. Drawing from a broad range of influences, Tee interlaces disparate reference points as a means to contemplate life’s fragile connections. A new large-scale collage made of petals from the elusive black tulip, a flower much revered in Dutch cultural history, will transform during the exhibition, slowly fading in the daylight. It weaves together two family histories: Tee’s maternal grandfather was a tulip grower, while the geometric patterns reference the traditional textiles of her father’s Chinese-Indonesian heritage. Through the work, Tee approaches the potential loss of identity, language, and kinship with one’s ancestry as part of the complex and fluid patchwork of cross-cultural narratives.
A new series of fabric and ceramic floor works, Resist, also respond to the exhibition title. Three crystalline hand-knitted textiles unfold onto the floor to create a space which simultaneously takes up the room’s volume and cuts into it. Ceramic ‘resist shapes’, created through a process of forming clay over the top of a mould, punctuate the installation. Both the ceramics and textiles traverse binary positions, occupying and outlining interior and exterior space. Acting at once as a standalone sculptural installation and as a potential stage, the works anticipate forthcoming activation.
During the exhibition, Tee will engage with the works through readings and performance. The readings will be selected from texts responding to the idea of resistance, while the choreographed performance will merge movement with the floorplan of the crystalline shapes, and fuse thought processes with underlying influences in an attempt to align mind, body, and spirit.
Jennifer Tee (b.1973 Arnhem, the Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. Tee has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2016); Cobra Museum, Amstelveen, the Netherlands (2015); Kunstverein, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2014) Signal at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2014) Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2013) Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2013); Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2010), SAFN Contemporary Art, Reykjavik (2007); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2003). Recent group exhibitions include Six Possibilities for a Sculpture, La Loge, Brussels (2013); Beyond Imagination, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2012); Secret Societies, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011); Nether Land, Dutch Culture Center, Shanghai World Expo (2010), Double Dutch, Hudson Valley for Contemporary Art, New York (2009) and the Prague Triennale (2008). In 2004 she represented the Netherlands at the São Paulo Biennial.
