In her work, Dionne Lee explores her relationship to the natural world and experiments with processes like scanning, solarization, and scrawling across the surfaces of her prints with graphite. In North and True North, Lee pictures her hands in a gesture used in the northern hemisphere to locate the North Star. She shows us how the body can be used as a tool—here, a compass. She also considers north as an aspirational destination for people fleeing enslavement in the southern United States, reflecting that her own ancestors may have “held their body in that same position.” By performing this gesture, she calls back to them.
Gallery label from 2021
