Opening reception: Friday 6 March, 6.30 - 9 pm
The Sunday Painter is pleased to present Yards, Jennifer J. Lee's second solo exhibition at the gallery. The title of the presentation operates as both measurement and metaphor. A yard is the American increment that structures a football field into legible territory, the unit by which fabric is sold and blankets are made. Lee's subjects – vintage afghans cropped from online marketplaces, astroturf fields photographed from unusual aerial perspectives – share this common denominator. They are measured, commodified, gridded. Yet they are also vessels for something more elusive: cultural memory compressed into pattern, ritual distilled into color and line.
To arrive at this compression of meaning, Lee employs a particular kind of slowing that occurs when something weightless is made heavy. The image – that flickering, frictionless thing we scroll past countless times before we've even had breakfast – suddenly gains mass. It demands our time. It forces us to really look. Sourcing photographs from the algorithmic sprawl of eBay listings and stock photography databases, Lee transforms the ephemeral into the obstinately material. On thick jute burlap – a surface that announces its own coarseness, its refusal of photographic smoothness – she renders her subjects with a hyperrealism so exacting it borders on the uncanny. The process is painstaking: pulling a digital image apart, pixel by pixel, then rebuilding it with an attention that feels almost devotional.
Blankets, Lee suggests, are like flags – each pattern a lineage passed down through generations, now circulating in the perpetual marketplace of resale platforms. Football fields, too, announce allegiances, domestications of war where conflict is ritualised into yardage gained and lost. Both flatten complex histories into geometric planes. Both are viewed through the eye of a camera, which skews perspective and turns the tangible into the purely visual. What emerges is not merely a painting of a photograph, but an interrogation of how images circulate, what they signify, and what happens when they're forced to be still.