Eva Lee

Born in New York, NY. Received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, New York, NY, and a B.A. from Bard College, Annandale, NY . Lives and works in Ridgefield, CT.

Recent solo exhibitions at Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Jan Cicero Gallery, Chicago, IL ; The Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York, NY; Thirteen Gallery, Danbury, CT; and The Stamford Museum & Nature Center, Stamford, CT.

Participated in group exhibitions at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; The Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum, Hartford, CT; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; P.S. 122 Gallery, New York, NY; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY.

Eva Lee joins a growing number of contemporary artists who seek to merge art and science by twisting data into metaphor. Information, gathered by the left brains of scientists, is processed through the right brains of artists to yield images and objects that provide an overlay of emotional, psychological, and spiritual qualities on seemingly objective phenomena. In this way, a more holistic vision of human inquiry is revealed. Science is driven by passion, and art is informed by observable and quantifiable materials and technologies.

In her arrestingly beautiful video installation, Lee literally creates an emotional terrain. Much landscape-based art is involved with the pathetic fallacy, an aesthetic strategy in which human feelings are metaphorically ascribed to inanimate things—an angry cloud, a tranquil sea. Here the artist avoids this tried-and-true approach. In her work, fraught with feelings, emotions are not applied to or elicited from existing landscapes, but are built into the structure and appearance of brand new worlds.

-Nick Capasso, Curator

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I am indebted to Dr. Seuss for his story “Horton Hears a Who,” which first gave me the idea as a child that worlds may exist though we cannot perceive them. What a concept! This cracked open my imagination. As an artist, I wonder about the unseen, such as spaces between cells, the jostling of subatomic particles, the shape of the universe, etc. I am inspired by what lies at the threshold of perception. Discrete Terrain: Windows on Five Emotions is a project in which I make inner subjective states visible as external topology. This work invites the viewer to the worlds of twelve individuals who participated in a neuroscientific study on the brain basis of emotions. I created 3D-animations based on their EEG (electroencephalogram) data recorded during five emotional conditions (anger, joy, fear, sadness, and disgust). These are presented as windows looking in on otherworldly territories.

-Eva Lee

Image: Eva Lee, Discrete Terrain: Windows on Five Emotions (detail of video still), 2007, digital video installation, 5 min 29 sec, dimensions variable. Lent by the Artist.