Dinh Q. Lê - The Scrolls: Distortion

October 7th - December 19th, 2017
Opening Reception: October 7th, 5 - 7 PM

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Scrolls: Distortion by Dinh Q. Lê.  This is the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.  The exhibition will be on view October 7th through December 19th, 2017, with an opening reception on Saturday October 7th from 5-7pm. 

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The Scrolls: Distortion is a new body of work and a cumulative exploration of Lê’s oeuvre to date, putting his series such as Persistence of Memory, From Vietnam to Hollywood, A Quagmire This Time, and Remnants, Ruins, Civilization, and Empire in conversation with one another.  Key to this body of work is Lê’s attention to memory.  Whereas previously Lê’s work dealt with fragmented memory and processes of piecing together or reconciling painful and traumatic histories, here he is presenting memory as landscape.   
 
The main gallery features eight photo scrolls installed in the center of the gallery.  For these works, Lê stretches an image to about 164 feet resulting in an elongated and distorted but still recognizable representation of that image. Lê’s technical strategy is directly indicative of his subject matter, which deals with the ways in which memory becomes distorted over time.  Just as landscapes shift and change over time, so too does memory.
 
Lê’s use of the scroll format draws on ancient Chinese scroll paintings, which typically depicted landscapes.  As the scroll is unrolled only a small portion of the painting is revealed at a time.  Lê’s own photo scrolls refer to traditional scroll paintings while at the same time encouraging a more dynamic and conceptual conversation about landscape and the various iterations it can embody. 
 
While Lê’s scrolls present photography as abstract object and sculpture, the artist’s woven photographs in the west gallery present photography as tactile.  Utilizing his signature Vietnamese mat weaving technique in a larger format than ever before, these photographs collage imagery of murals of the Cambodian epic poem Reamker, based on the Sanskrit Ramayana epic, with portraits from the S-21 prison and images from the Cambodian Civil War. 
 
Dinh Q. Lê has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at prestigious venues including, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Mori Art Museum, Japan; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassell, Germany, and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy to name just a few.  Lê has an upcoming exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and at C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Cordoba, Spain.  His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and Mori Art Museum in Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art amongst many others. Lê has been the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio residency award and the Prince Claus Fund for Cultural and Development amongst others.  The artist lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.