MICKEY LEE
January 12 – 31 2024
To anthropomorphize or not to anthropomorphize?
Of course, the question doesn’t roll off the tongue like "to be or not to be"—but these days it’s a relevant question nonetheless. The world is chockablock with videos of animals getting up to clever hijinks that seem almost human. You know you’ve seen them (and sent them). But wait. “No!” Some irate person scolds in the comments. “They’re not human, so don’t ascribe human motivations to animals’ shenanigans!”
Okay. But what if they have it backwards? Maybe it’s not whether animals are really almost human—maybe it’s whether humans are really almost animals. Such a discussion might seem an unlikely doorway into the midnight garden of good and evil of the young painter Mickey Lee. But in the her darkling view, animals and humans are distinguished by shape, not by spirit. Everyone’s behavior seems elegant—at first. But all living things a la Lee seem to exist on the cusp between pretty and pretty deceptive.
Take, for example, her painting of two sinewy, staring Xoloitzcuintles, or Xolos, the Mexican hairless dogs that were sacred to the Aztecs and were often buried with their owners to guide them to the afterlife. Lee’s mom-and-dad couple look sweet, and yes, the rainbow patchwork path to paradise looks dreamy and inviting. But they also look like they could dispatch you to the afterlife with one quick lunge to the throat.
Such tension comes naturally to Lee, whose mother is Mexican but who was raised by her American father, a carpenter, in in the countryside of Oregon. An intensely quiet child who almost always refused to speak, Lee was coaxed by her father into expressing herself nonverbally drawing, painting, sculpture, or whatever media he could scrounge together from work sites.
Shying away from human contact, she was also drawn to animals, both those she could find in nature and in books. “That’s part of why this show I called Anima,” says Lee. “It means the soul, especially the intuitive, irrational part of the soul. But I’ve always been drawn to animal protagonists. I grew up in farm country so I was surrounded by animals—geese, ducks, swans. They’re so beautiful but they also have this terrifying Jurassic quality.”
That very dichotomy is pulled taut in another new painting, a serene pastel Art Deco nude figure surrounded with tropical birds. At least it looks serene until you realize a pigeon is about to bite her nipple off.
There’s another underlying tension in the work that’s less visible, stemming not from the childhood Lee had but the one she didn’t—an imagined world of her faraway fantasies of Mexico and her distant mother. There’s a hefty dose of magic realism in her canvases, but it seems infused with a contemporary message about humanity’s most tragic flaw: we love to think we’re ahead of nature, yet we always end up behind it. Or under it.
For Lee, it’s an evolving idea. This spring, she is taking an extended sojourn to Mexico to broaden her experience and see and even paint some of her inheritance. But one thing is for sure—that tension is going anywhere. What would life, or art, be without it?
David Colman
Mickey Lee was born in Forest Grove, Oregon in 1996. She received a MA from the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California.
Lee’s recent solo and group exhibitions include "Apocalypse Now" at The Journal Gallery in Patmos, Greece (2023); "Apostasy" at Half Gallery in New York, New York (2023); "El Royale" at Loyal Gallery in Los Angeles, California (2023); "Blue Hour" at One Trick Pony in Los Angeles, California (2023); "Burdens of Trout" at Half Gallery in New York, New York (2022); "I Do My Own Stunts" Curated by Jack Siebert and Caio Twombly at Spazio Amanita (2022); and "Tender Fury" at One Trick Pony in Los Angeles, California (2022).
Mickey Lee lives and works in New York, New York.
To anthropomorphize or not to anthropomorphize?
Of course, the question doesn’t roll off the tongue like "to be or not to be"—but these days it’s a relevant question nonetheless. The world is chockablock with videos of animals getting up to clever hijinks that seem almost human. You know you’ve seen them (and sent them). But wait. “No!” Some irate person scolds in the comments. “They’re not human, so don’t ascribe human motivations to animals’ shenanigans!”
Okay. But what if they have it backwards? Maybe it’s not whether animals are really almost human—maybe it’s whether humans are really almost animals. Such a discussion might seem an unlikely doorway into the midnight garden of good and evil of the young painter Mickey Lee. But in the her darkling view, animals and humans are distinguished by shape, not by spirit. Everyone’s behavior seems elegant—at first. But all living things a la Lee seem to exist on the cusp between pretty and pretty deceptive.
Take, for example, her painting of two sinewy, staring Xoloitzcuintles, or Xolos, the Mexican hairless dogs that were sacred to the Aztecs and were often buried with their owners to guide them to the afterlife. Lee’s mom-and-dad couple look sweet, and yes, the rainbow patchwork path to paradise looks dreamy and inviting. But they also look like they could dispatch you to the afterlife with one quick lunge to the throat.
Such tension comes naturally to Lee, whose mother is Mexican but who was raised by her American father, a carpenter, in in the countryside of Oregon. An intensely quiet child who almost always refused to speak, Lee was coaxed by her father into expressing herself nonverbally drawing, painting, sculpture, or whatever media he could scrounge together from work sites.
Shying away from human contact, she was also drawn to animals, both those she could find in nature and in books. “That’s part of why this show I called Anima,” says Lee. “It means the soul, especially the intuitive, irrational part of the soul. But I’ve always been drawn to animal protagonists. I grew up in farm country so I was surrounded by animals—geese, ducks, swans. They’re so beautiful but they also have this terrifying Jurassic quality.”
That very dichotomy is pulled taut in another new painting, a serene pastel Art Deco nude figure surrounded with tropical birds. At least it looks serene until you realize a pigeon is about to bite her nipple off.
There’s another underlying tension in the work that’s less visible, stemming not from the childhood Lee had but the one she didn’t—an imagined world of her faraway fantasies of Mexico and her distant mother. There’s a hefty dose of magic realism in her canvases, but it seems infused with a contemporary message about humanity’s most tragic flaw: we love to think we’re ahead of nature, yet we always end up behind it. Or under it.
For Lee, it’s an evolving idea. This spring, she is taking an extended sojourn to Mexico to broaden her experience and see and even paint some of her inheritance. But one thing is for sure—that tension is going anywhere. What would life, or art, be without it?
David Colman
Mickey Lee was born in Forest Grove, Oregon in 1996. She received a MA from the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California.
Lee’s recent solo and group exhibitions include "Apocalypse Now" at The Journal Gallery in Patmos, Greece (2023); "Apostasy" at Half Gallery in New York, New York (2023); "El Royale" at Loyal Gallery in Los Angeles, California (2023); "Blue Hour" at One Trick Pony in Los Angeles, California (2023); "Burdens of Trout" at Half Gallery in New York, New York (2022); "I Do My Own Stunts" Curated by Jack Siebert and Caio Twombly at Spazio Amanita (2022); and "Tender Fury" at One Trick Pony in Los Angeles, California (2022).
Mickey Lee lives and works in New York, New York.