Dual Florescence: YehRim Lee and Chase Travaille
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
Exhibition Statement
YehRim Lee:
For Dual Fluorescence, Yehrim Lee channels Spring’s fecundity in floral shapes and overabundant blossoms. Having brought two children into the world in the last two years, the spirit of the season of birth and rebirth is foremost in her mind. Her hands create blooms in vases and on walls. Light blues, dusty pinks, and greens fold in and press out of central pistils. Lee hand-builds her work using traditional onngi jar-making methods passed down in her family of Korean ceramicists. This method allows the strength needed to support complex shapes and the quickness to be expressive in a medium that typically demands slower building. Her work often references traditional Korean ceramics, but she brings in Western notions of expressive overabundance by using multiple glazes with varied textures, drips, and sheens.
Yehrim Lee and Chase Travaille were residents together at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. There, their work cross-pollinated, and shards of Yehrim’s work found their way into Travaille’s earliest shard vases. Both Lee and Traville experiment with notions of obsessive repetition and process on overdrive. Lee fires and re-fires, introducing new glazes each cycle, building, as plants often do in the spring, by accretion, layer by layer. The idea of fluorescence is not only about flowering, but also a figurative bursting forth. In any season, but especially the spring, Lee’s work strives to burst forth with exuberance, color, and movement.
Chase Travaille:
This series draws from multiple early figurative traditions- Venus figurines and Cycladic idols alike-where the body functions as a symbolic vessel rather than a portrait. Constructed by the floral shards of diverse artists, the work subverts the idea of a singular origin or unified body. Retitled as Mother Willendorf and related forms, the word mother here signifies esteem, kinship, and chosen lineage. The title mother becomes fluid and something that can be inhabited, bestowed, or recognized- much like the Venus form itself has been repeatedly reinterpreted across cultures and histories.
I chose to remix the flowers from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus painting through collage utilizing yupo paper and images of YehRim’s ceramic work to build a bridge between my pieces and hersfor this exhibition. I’ll never forget meeting YehRim back in 2020 while at the Archie Bray Foundation. Upon meeting her she introduced herself as YehRim like “Yay!” rim, with joy and a bounce to her step. She was always so kind to me and visited my studio often to check in. She hadn’t become a mother like she is now to two beautiful children, but I’d say she was always and still is Mother.
