Dionne Lee: Currents – The Brooklyn Rail

Dionne Lee: Currents
Dionne Lee
Aperture, 2026

Dionne Lee’s first monograph dedicates most of its pages to plates of the artist’s main works of video, images, and collage from the previous decade that interrogate histories of panorama, survival, and Black life within the United States. That historical past is rife with a pressure between nature’s potential as a web site of refuge and the truth of America’s violent historical past of slavery and dispossession. Lee describes this pressure as “a conflict of belonging between people and place,” an idea that underpins a lot of her observe.

The cowl presents a element of a photographic collage, North (2019), which reveals the artist’s two arms reaching upward, along with her thumbs gently touching and pinky fingers outstretched. Recalling how her ancestors as soon as held their our bodies in the exact same place to navigate themselves from the South to the North when escaping enslavement, Lee describes how enacting this pose “felt very much like an ancestral portal.” Navigation is a recurring theme all through the monograph, whether or not as a symbolic attain northward or in Lee’s use of a dowsing rod in her video Challenger Deep (2019). In a dialog with fellow artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Lee asks, “What does it mean to come from a diasporic people, through forced migration, and try to make a home?”

The artist’s voice is central to the monograph, rising as a frequent reference in contributions by curator Eric Booker and poet Camille T. Dungy. Building on the extra scholarly essays by Booker and Dungy, which set up an artwork historic context and narrative round Lee’s observe, the dialog with Hill explores matters similar to panorama, lineage, and grief within the artist’s personal phrases. Their cautious dialogue closes the monograph on a reflective tone that each marks Lee’s musings within the current and harkens again to the ideas referenced in her work.

Booker’s essay traces Lee’s engagement with panorama, from a formative video Drafts (2016) that she made as a graduate scholar on the California College of the Arts in San Francisco to her most up-to-date physique of labor exhibited in 2025 at Storm King Art Center. Booker curated this presentation, which included fifteen locally-sourced boulders with hand-made drawings etched into their surfaces. The artist coated these rocks in a light-sensitive iron-salt resolution, utilizing the cyanotype course of, and uncovered them from daybreak to nightfall earlier than rinsing them to develop—in Lee’s phrases—her “first landscape photograph.” The ensuing picture in deep indigo captured the adjustments in daylight and ambiance over the course of someday. Over the continuing months, the colour shifted to diverse shades of wealthy blues and weathered browns.

Her etchings on boulders in upstate New York adopted a sequence of rock drawings, similar to Untitled Rock Drawing I, that Lee made in 2023. While on a residency with Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, Texas, Lee visited Chaco Canyon, a significant cultural heart for Ancestral Puebloans. Reckoning along with her personal incapacity to entry a comparable web site of ancestral connection, Lee encountered petroglyphs within the form of a spiral made by the Indigenous Pueblo peoples. As Lee, Hill, and Booker describe, the spiral got here to carry myriad meanings for the artist, together with “diasporic place-making” and “a reminder of forced removal of past generations from the land.” After inscribing her personal hand-made marks on rocks, Lee administered a spiral form onto these discovered pure objects. In Untitled Rock Drawing III (2023), she used water to create a shimmering coil atop the stone, whereas in Untitled Rock Drawing II (2023), she rigorously organized a chunk of string—one other motif that seems throughout her oeuvre.