The great Dr Lee

Topo much to say here right now, about how great this man is, but needles to say anyone with a doctorate in graffiti and youth culture is pretty ok in my books. Here's how the man drops science...



Nicholas Hersey
Synaesthesia


Sofia Coppola’s 1993 Lost in Translation, is a story of alienation in a foreign country and is the story of an attempt by Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and a lone female, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansen) to find for a short moment, a kind of transcendent coherence within a foreign cultural space that has left them both losing their grip on the local reality. Synaesthesia is about the translation of one sensory form into another, but it is also about creation because in translation one register is always incapable of exhausting or even managing to communicate that of another. There is always the creation of something else, a kind of third space where another meaning appears.

Malcolm McLaren knew about this too with the creation of Punk. The bringing together of domestic icons into a new context manifested a new countercultural meaning, this was a new space created, not out of nothing, but of the myriad of cultural baggage swimming in our own heads.

Hersey explores this third space. Using a range of images– some edgy, some ambiguous, some personal– he creates a palette of ‘imagery for redeployment’. These images created over a period of time are both Hersey’s own images and monikers for our own.

Whiling one’s way through the forty images one finds each one striking a chord to a greater or lesser degree, begging the viewer’s own desire for order, coherence and meaning. This is a primordial moment, a deep-seated desire for order amongst chaos, searching for the gestalt, the synchrony, the moment where it all gels. This is the essential human conundrum: to find meaning in the chaos of the everyday.

In the work, the viewer’s own selection of images does not leave them alone. Instead the viewer is unnerved by them, the way their patterns interfere and the way comfortable combinations become uncomfortable as the third space, new messages in this moment of bricolage miraculously appear.

Hersey’s images catch us unawares. They seduce us into liking and disliking things we don’t quite understand, naturally we romp through the images imposing order on them, and magically and unexpectedly we are revealed.



Dr. Andrew Lee

still at it

...a few days to go to the opening of the new show, and im still scratchin away! Bought some nice big sheets of aluminium dibond coupla days ago, and spent this evening arousing some textures, then tickling in some imagery that should arouse suspicion and confusion. Having been lucky enough to have a press release written for me by the amazing Dr Andrew Lee, I have been inspired to complete some larger format pieces to complement the smaller ones already set for the show. You can read his release later, as I havent got it to hand right now :(

Anyway, from pseudo biblical references to girls holding kittens, all the allegorical imagery is in there, hopefully proving some more 'transcendent coherence' as Dr Lee puts it. Will upload pics soon!