TAKE TIME, TRY
JESSE LY
7/12/24-8/24/24
Jesse Ly - i think it’s nice to wait, Archival inkjet prints in handmade frames, 17”” x 13”, 2024
The Weather Station is pleased to present Take Time, Try, an exhibition of new and recent work by Jesse Ly. Take Time, Try brings together several groupings of photographs alongside a body of sculptural work, all of which demonstrate Ly's refined sensibility to the image as a material, and to material as an image.
The exhibition title Take Time, Try makes two petitions of the audience: to rest and to attempt. These notions of care and labor are ongoing concerns for the artist, who uses the camera as a primary tool to document, enlarge and explore these ideas through the twin lenses of lived experience and personal identity. For this exhibition, Ly groups their intimately scaled photographs in sequences around the gallery, animating relationships across dissimilar imagery: a close-cropped composition of nearly-spent candles suggests multiple forms of burnout when preceded by a view of two pairs of legs on a bed. An exquisite portrait of a spiderweb becomes all the more fragile when placed next to a hand, the back of which catches tiny eclipse-shadows.
Jesse Ly - ease the burdens of the day, Archival inkjet prints in handmade frames, 17”” x 13”, 2024
For Ly, the photograph is a means to pull something from reality to be relived, re-shaped and extended. Sites of labor and scenes of care are scaled equally to create a kind of visual equivalency between the two, and suggest a give-and-take between the needs (and impulses) of work and the needs (and pleasures) of rest. Installation, sequence and arrangement are all important aspects of coaxing new meanings from these photographs, as this is where the artist finds a sense of earnestness and sincerity in their process. "The work needs to be modular, and based on circumstance, " Ly reasons, "just like we have to be."
That said, any photograph is a translation, and thus a flattening, of its subject. Speaking to this, Ly has created impart, a beguiling suite of hand-carved wooden hammers installed on a low pedestal at the center of the space. Based on a previous photograph the artist had made, Ly recreates on a one-to-one scale a mallet, tack, ball peen, claw, and sledge hammer from the same Walnut wood that frames each of their photographs. As objects, the care and craft contained in each of Ly's wooden hammers fundamentally opposes their utility. As symbols, however, they become tidy oxymorons of both labor and care - framing Ly's concerns in a material form while asking viewers to reconsider the photographs on similar terms. Indeed, these are objects to be looked at, but they are also objects to be pondered with. Take time, Ly asks each of us, try.
Jesse Ly - impart (. mallet, tack, claw, ball peen, sledge. ), Walnut, Varying sizes, 2024
Ly's use of photography alongside sculpture, writing, artist's books or publishing has been a means to inform and expand upon their imagery in their practice, and allow for multiple interpretations. For Ly, this hybrid approach to process and media mirrors the nature of our identity structures - cultural identifications, gender expressions, sexualities - and the fluidities that these structures contain. Making a visual space for these fluidities has been an ongoing goal for Ly's practice for some time. They initially came to photography for self-autonomy, and as a means to "revise" the photographs taken of them as a child - photographs in which they had no agency. Their recent work positions care at the center of representation, opening photographs to become objects that empower while simultaneously resisting closure.
Jesse Ly (he/they) is an Asian-American photographic and image-based artist. They hold a BFA from the University of Cincinnati, and currently work as the Graphic Design and Photography Media Facilities Coordinator at the University of Dayton. They have exhibited work both nationally and internationally. Solo and two person exhibitions include Image Interference at Basketshop Gallery - Cincinnati, OH, Support Systems at SHAG (Stone House Art Gallery) Charlotte, NC and please remember this... at The Neon Heater - Findlay, OH. Group exhibitions include Wild Frictions: The Politics and Poetics of Interruption at The Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Auto//Update at the Carnegie Arts Center - Covington, KY, and I Don’t Know How To Respond To That at the PhMuseum - Bologna, Italy. They are a recipient of two Culture Works Artist Opportunity Grants, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, a Regional Artist Renewal Grant via the National Endowment for the Arts, and was recently named a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize for 2023.
Jesse Ly - transition to action, Archival inkjet prints in handmade frames, 17”” x 13”, 2024
Installation Shot of take time, try
Installation Shot of take time, try