Dionne Lee

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Join us for a public conversation between the summer 2023 exhibiting artists, moderated by Lorna Brown.

### RSVP
Registration for this event is required. Secure your place [here](https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/talk-gabrielle-lhirondelle-hill-dionne-lee-sesemiya-with-lorna-brown-tickets-636858449767).

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### Biographies
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is an artist and writer. Her practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the 59th Venice Biennale; Le Magasin CNAC, Grenoble; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon; and Gallery TPW, Toronto. She is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective that seeks to challenge Eurocentric art models, and to centre the land and Indigenous epistemologies. Hill is Cree and English, with maternal roots in the Michel Band and Papaschase. She lives on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

Sesemiya (Tracy Williams) is a knowledge seeker, dreamer, water protector, land defender, lover, mother, auntie, weaver, and cultural practitioner. Her rich relationships with plants, animals, land, and water have taken her to the tops of mountains, the bottom of the ocean, fields of fireweed, and occasionally art galleries. Her work has appeared in exhibitions such as *lineages and land bases*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); *Intangible: Memory and Innovation in Coast Salish Art*, Bill Reid Gallery (2017); and *N. Vancouver*, The Polygon Gallery (2017). In 2021, a commissioned work of Sesemiya’s was included in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s presentation of Yoko Ono’s *Water Event*. Sesemiya is a proud member of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Nation.

Dionne Lee is a visual artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and video. Her work explores power and personal history in relation to the American landscape, and interrogates historical narratives that exist within photographic representations of land and place. Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Feria Material, Mexico City; New Orleans Museum of Art; Aperture Foundation, New York; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others. Lee was a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation and is a 2021–2023 Artist-in-Residence with Unseen California.

Lorna Brown is a Vancouver-based visual artist, curator, writer and editor. Brown is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, and is an ongoing member of the Other Sights Producer team. She was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004, an artist-run centre focusing on the relationship between visual art and writing. Between 2015 and 2022, she was Acting Director/Curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, curating exhibition series such as *Beginning With the Seventies* that explored the relationship between art, archives and activism. Brown has exhibited her work internationally since 1984, and has taught at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she received an honorary doctorate of letters in 2015. Awards include the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Belkin, SFU Galleries, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.

thumbnail_In Conversation - Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Dionne Lee and Sesemiya with Lorna Brown.jpg

In Conversation - Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Dionne Lee and Sesemiya with Lorna Brown.jpg

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Dionne Lee & Sesemiya with Lorna Brown

In Conversation

Please join us to celebrate CAG's summer 2023 exhibitions, *Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill: M******, *Sesemiya: s7ulh waḵáy̓stn iy ta stamsh cht*, and *Dionne Lee: Ratios*. The artists will be in attendance.

All ages welcome. Cash bar.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

thumbnail_Process image 2 (cropped), Gabe Hill.png

Process image 2 (cropped), Gabe Hill.png

Summer 2023

Opening Reception

The work of Dionne Lee engages closely with photographic methodologies to pursue forms of knowledge counter to the imperialist assumptions that underlie the conventions of North American landscape photography. Central to Lee’s practice is the body’s experience of the world at a close distance, a scale that she privileges in her work as an access point for understanding the relationship between people and land.

In *Ratios*, displayed as a trio of photographs at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station and a series of successively darkening photocopies on CAG’s façade, Lee mutually implicates small rocks and her own hand as tools to measure each other. Invoking the practice in geological survey photographs to include small objects in frame to indicate scale, these works stage by proxy the relationship between human bodies and land, and the asymmetry of their impacts on one another. 

*Dionne Lee: Ratios* is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program — InTransit BC.

#### Biography
Dionne Lee is a visual artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and video. Her work explores power and personal history in relation to the American landscape, and interrogates historical narratives that exist within photographic representations of land and place. Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Feria Material, Mexico City; New Orleans Museum of Art; Aperture Foundation, New York; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others. Lee was a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation and is a 2021–2023 Artist-in-Residence with Unseen California.

CAG Summer 2023 Program Guide - Web.pdf

CAG - Dionne Lee - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print - Web.pdf

CAG - Dionne Lee - Exhibition Guide - Large Print - Web.pdf

thumbnail_Dionne Lee - Ratios (detail).jpg

Dionne Lee - Ratios (detail).jpg

CAG’s façade with Dionne Lee’s Ratios across eight street-facing windows. The artworks each depict a hand with small white pebbles placed on its joints, and from left to right appear successively darker across the series.

thumbnail_01 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

01 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A pair of windows featuring a pair of images depicting a hand with small white pebbles placed on its joints. Both images are legible, with the right image slightly darker than the left one.

thumbnail_02 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

02 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A pair of windows featuring a pair of images depicting a hand with small white pebbles placed on its joints. Both images are darker than is optimum, with the right image darker than the left one.

thumbnail_03 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

03 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A pair of windows featuring a pair of images depicting a hand with small white pebbles placed on its joints. Both images are significantly darker than is optimum, with the right image darker than the left one. The image is difficult to make out.

thumbnail_04 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

04 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A pair of windows featuring what look like black smudges or shadows. The right image is slightly darker than the left one.

thumbnail_05 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

05 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A frontal view of a SkyTrain station with two photos in its windows. The first photo depicts a rock with bits of white tape arranged in an oval around its perimeter. The second depicts the same rock with bits of white tape dotting its surface.

thumbnail_06 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

06 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A frontal view of a SkyTrain station with one photo in its window. The photo depicts a rock on a blue tarp with a hand drawn on its surface and bits of white tape arranged in an oval around its perimeter. 

thumbnail_07 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

07 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A diagonal view of a SkyTrain station with three photos in its windows. The photos each depict a rock on a blue tarp with bits of white tape arranged either in an oval around its perimeter or on its surface. A hand is drawn on one rock’s surface.

Dionne Lee

Exhibitions

Talks & Events