Lee Henderson
Canada
Lee’s is a making practice marked by the persistence of collective histories and the brevity of individual lives… which is to say it's funny, in the same way King Lear is funny.
Lee is interested in understanding problems, with an awareness that the work of the artist lies in revealing false problems rather than solving real ones. But whether investigating problems of definition or perception, or of measurement or identification, existential crises or mundane anxieties, he has so far found that they all collapse back to the central problem of the terminus, that presumed point of ambiguous inevitability we spend our conscious lives avoiding, or from which we supposedly sprang. This doesn't have to mean the beginning/end of a particular human life—it can as easily be the disappearance of a culture, the retrofitting of an edifice, the emergence of a language, or the transition between weather patterns. And like an electron or a fable, when examined with care, the terminus problem-point reveals itself to be permeable, mutable, and indiscernible.
Throughout this process Lee stumbles, he gropes; and latches on to a piece of material, or an historical factoid, or the cultural baggage of an object, or a quirk of language, and become fascinated-obsessed until it reveals the mortal banality of its associations. Those associations—networks of human intellectual-emotional investment, more commonly known as "meaning"—then find expression in reconfigurations of light, text, space, sound, and matter. Making artwork is every bit as absurd, direct, and fruitful as rearranging furniture just to see the pattern on the floor.
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