Jennifer Tee
Ultraviolet. Ripeness Of Event
Galerie Fons Welters - Back Space
22 Feb – 29 Mar 2003
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With Ultraviolet. Ripeness of event, Jennifer Tee (1973) has her first solo-exhibition at Galerie Fons Welters. She has done solo-exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and museum Het Domein in Sittard, and her work has been on show in Wiite de With (Rotterdam), Montevideo (Amsterdam) and on several other locations in Europe, America and China. In September 2003 Jennifer Tee will start a new project in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Jennifer Tee's work has a few very conspicuous traits. Her videos, installations, environments, and performances play with mythical elements and create new stories - that somehow never completely break with older storytelling elements and themes. This is not to say that Tee's work tells a story with traditional structures. A personal starting-point - in Ultraviolet. Ripeness of event for example, she used all kinds of things she stumbled upon during recent stays in China and Los Angeles - with Tee never ends up as a personal story. The elements and objects used will among themselves create new stories, that of course do not simply end somewhere. Various thoughts, symbols or mental dispositions appear simultaneously (stimulated by the elements and forms that are chosen by the artist): the principle of synchronicity. The spaces in the exhibition are pictures at a given moment from a train of thought, they are indices, moments of visibility, that can be further thought through and worked out.
In Ultraviolet. Ripeness of event, Tee transforms the gallery space into an environment for research, an environment that could serve as a location for upcoming projects. Visitors can lower one big tent and two smaller tents made of colourful fabrics, standing underneath. Or they can seat themselves on stools or on a hassock, and put on a suit with neon tubes. The large tent, neon yellow on the inside, plays with daylight falling through the glass roof of the gallery. A gigantic sculpture made of Chinese bamboo, neon and ceramic elements with texts lends the visitor narrative-poetic assistance.
In this exhibition, Jennifer Tee explores a formulation of her work as an event or festival: the event as "a moment of intensity that gives meaning and form to life" [Tee]. The event can bring about a connection between man, objects and spaces, making it possible to experience a liberating moment. An 'intermediate phase', in which a temporary unity is sought between life and consciousness. Needless to say, the marking moment of the event can have a fictional base, and furthermore can be filled in by any and every one by themselves. With the 'information' from the exhibition, one can create a private image of possible applications of the spaces in the exhibition; of possible narratives that could unfold inside these spaces.
[Merel van Tilburg]