For the eleventh edition of Storm King’s Outlooks program, which offers emerging and mid-career artists the opportunity to present a temporary large-scale project outdoors, Dionne Lee will create her first outdoor sculptures. 

Lee manipulates photographic conventions as a means of reframing our relationship with land and place. The artist will use a cyanotype photographic process to create a series of sculptures that release the land from an anthropocentric perspective, supporting her assertion of landscape photography beginning with the plant fossil. The cyanotype process—susceptible to natural elements—mirrors the shifting experience of climate, survival, and land ownership over time. 

Using stones sourced from Storm King’s landscape, the artist will coat each with cyanotype chemistry, which, when exposed to the sun, will turn shades of deep blue. Exposed from dawn to dusk, the rocks become an index of the gradual changes in light and other environmental factors, emphasizing the ephemeral nature of the image and its resistance to permanence. The artist then instinctually alters the surface with gestural marks, resulting in a physical manifestation of Lee’s collaboration with nature.

The exhibition is curated by Eric Booker, Associate Curator, with Adela Goldsmith, Curatorial Assistant.

This exhibition is made possible with major support by Roberta and Steven Denning and the Hazen Polsky Foundation, with lead support by Jennifer Brorsen and Richard DeMartini, Agnes Gund, and Lipman Family Foundation, and supported in part by Girlfriend Fund. 

This project is supported through a Market New York grant awarded by Empire State Development, and I LOVE NY, New York State’s Division of Tourism.