Belinda Lee, "Pink Sky." Courtesy of COCA
Belinda Lee's latest works will quietly overwhelm you, subtly unmooring how you thought you felt when you walked into the room.
“At first glance, they look like, 'This is just normal life,' but I want something to be off: birds inside; sunbathing by a nuclear plant,” Lee says of the eight drawings and dozen or so paintings created for Inside Out/Outside In, a solo exhibit opening at the Center of Creative Arts next Friday. “I want them to seem calm and crazy at the same time.”
Lee's in the final hectic weeks of preparing, adding little touches and big flourishes and choosing which paintings and drawings will be in the show. Unpainted walls and images from magazines and the internet and a small supply of Lego blocks for her grandson compete for space in the studio she's occupied for a couple years. She says she's excited to see how the works will take to the grander scale of the gallery walls.
Many of the pieces in the upcoming show derive from collages, which Lee says came directly out of teaching projects she's been at work on and a desire to move forward from the portraits she'd been specializing in. When collaging began, Lee says, with Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, the juxtapositions implicit in the art form shocked viewers.
“The way we look at art is so different now,” Lee, an instructor at Washington University, explains. “As a culture, we have shorter attention spans. We're bombarded with imagery—technology, TV, advertising. Now we're used to seeing things that don't necessarily go together. It gives even more license to put even odder things together.” And it's those incongruent elements that Lee uses to create the subtle sense of unease that runs through the show.
While the disparate elements of collage are at the heart of much of the work, they aren't, strictly speaking, collage. They're paintings and drawings of collages, which can give even the simplest image a sense of being out of the expected dimensions of space.
“When it's transitioning from a collage, the scale changes,” Lee explains. “There are always unexpected things when you wrestle with changes in scale and medium.”
A family sits around a table surrounded by bird-filled trees, and it's ominous somehow. A woman in the epitome of business-casual—grey blouse, putty-colored trousers and pumps—runs off copies in a bland office world: nothing to see here, folks, except for birds in flight and milling around the copier. A young man sunbathes—with a nuclear reactor in the background.
The collages themselves reflect Lee's evolving relationship with technology. While she says she appreciates the specificity that the Internet's vastness affords her in seeking images, she and the other artists she shares space with decided together not to enable the studios with wireless Internet. And she won't use digital imaging software to manipulate and stack images.
“I could do them in Photoshop, but I like physically making things with my hands,” she says. Making the final painted project is similarly satisfying: “With any image, as an artist you have to look at what's the best way to get the image across. I like the visceral quality of paint. It's physical.”
Several of the works share odd elements drawn from daily life, like the locusts who took over St. Louis this summer, or the redwing blackbirds who mysteriously fell from the Arkansas skies en masse recently.
But technology and our short attention spans inform the canvases as well. Seemingly simple tableaux are upended and made into something that puts a viewer subtly on edge, as they're invaded by calmly wrong elements.
“I guess it's my reaction to what's going on in the world. I'm not trying to be real specific but our world is changing really quickly,” Lee says. “There are some kind of scary things out there I'm reacting to: climate change, political upheaval. We're so used to crazy stuff in our worlds, we don't even pay attention to it.”
Inside Out/Outside In opens January 13 with a 6 p.m. reception and runs through February 26. COCA's Millstone Gallery (524 Trinity, 314-725-6555) is free and open to the public; gallery hours are 10am-5pm Mon-Fri, noon-5pm Sat & Sun, or by appointment.
