Shaping the Presence, Forming the Absence

For this exhibition, Jaye Rhee shows her four-channel video installation, The Flesh and the Book, which addresses the intersections between performance, video, and sound. Casting original dancers of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Rhee renders the human body as minimalist shapes that convey an improvisational selection of ‘notes’ within a musical composition co-created with Elliott Sharp. As in many of Rheeʼs works, at the heart of The Flesh and the Book lies an irreconcilable tension; here it exists between physical dance and musical notes. The dancers perform within a “musical staff” made of five thick rubber bands that are suspended at different heights yet are equidistant from each other. A visual loss occurs when the two-dimensional music notes transition into the three-dimensional dance, and vice versa. As more notes are gained, more dancers are lost; the two must maintain a balanced yet opposed existence.

About her work, the artist states, “My work explores the evasive nature of authentic desire. By focusing on the tension between “real” desire and “fake” objects of desire, as embodied by images—in the broadest sense of the word—my work presents “real fakes” and “imageless images.” Thus, it is concerned with making real fakes by forthrightly showing artifice without the concealment of ambiguity. This refusal to deny the actual substance of the materials with which I make art reveals the authenticity of these faked, imaginary worlds so that the product, as an artwork, is paradoxically a fake that, notwithstanding its artifice, is authentic and, thus genuine. My goal is to create a new visual space in which artifice evaporates through the very naked presentation of images as naked materials. This “honest artifice” would ultimately lead one into an experience of reflection about one’s own nostalgia.”