Artist: Mickey Lee
Exhibition title: Little Town
Venue: LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
Date: August 22 – September 28, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and LOYAL, Stockholm
LOYAL is proud to present Little Town, a new series of paintings by Mickey Lee, marking both her first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Europe.
There’s a place on the water’s edge. Shadowed waves eternally roll onto sandy banks where lunar women, gray skinned and inky haired dwell between marine and terrestrial. Their fish familiars float ashore and fly through the air, ancient ruins rest in the silver glow of a full moon. Inland, spears of summer grass set the stage for a band of bunnies dancing the oldest dance in the world. Monsters, angels, and messengers wait in a forest glade, time dripping by. A little town dense with colorful cottages, streets empty, its townspeople indoors, stands before an ominous sky. A storm is coming.
Mickey Lee’s Little Town spins a seaside tale inviting us into an enchanted world at the edge of summer. Flowers still bloom but skies teem with marbled atmospheres of bruised purples and shadowed grays. Each painting in Little Town offers a fleeting glimpse into this seaside realm, radiating a gem-like luminosity that shifts from every angle. A dynamic interplay between safety and threat, beauty and strangeness, comfort and unease looms throughout the series. This is the calm before the storm.
The exhibition Little Town begins with the painting Dear Traveler, a monumental female rises from watery depths, an emerald ship sails beside her. A blank stare and the figure’s slate-colored neck twisting away from the vessel suggests indifference to its passengers, yet the painting’s title Dear Traveler harbors care. We’re met with duality from the start, steering the undercurrent for the rest of our journey through the exhibition.
Shipwrecked features a female nude clutching a sailboat ashore. A black mermaid-like tail peaks from a wind whipped ocean. Salty air tosses strands of the female’s magenta hair skyward. She stares outwards, directly at us. This painting, paired with Lady and Brook Trout Ashore, conjures connections to The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli; nude females arriving on shore. The females featured in each painting cover their breasts with hand or ship. They arrive on shore via seashell or trout. If not Venus, goddess of love, beauty and sex, who are these women? Perhaps they are guardians of the water, elemental beings neutral to human law and order. Perhaps they are Mary Mother of Light, the patron saint of seafarers, or the sirens washed ashore Cyprus after jumping into the sea upon Orpheus’ lute playing. Perhaps these women don’t have an origin story or specific persona, they simply exist as creatures of the deep.
Water on a mytho-poetic level signifies the subconscious, dreams, and visions. These seascape paintings anticipate and lead us further into the subconscious and mythic as we journey inland. In the triptych, The Oldest Dance in the World we’re met with four bunnies forming a loop. Could these bunnies, in forming a circle, signify eternal rhythms, loop phenomenons, infinity; the oldest dance in the world? This series of paintings may set the scene for the calm before the storm but the storm will come and go and there will be another calm before the storm, an eternal cycle, an ouroboros. Behind the dancing bunnies we see a village cresting a hilltop abundant with flowers and trees. In the paintings Remembrance and Youth we’re met with still lifes of flowers that act as memento mori or reminders of the permanence of impermanence.
Beyond the carefully painted flowers and forest groves filled with all manners of creatures, we see Little Town. Brightly colored domestic tiles glint beneath a rose -colored moon. The townspeople in this little town are indoors engaging in immodest acts. In the painting titled Immodest Acts, a reclining woman in repose rests a hand on a pair of blue legs, pink sex exposed. More limbs fill the scene, stretched and flopped in unnatural positions.
As we find ourselves inland and at the end of our journey we wonder about the marble maidens and the little town by the sea emptied of its folk. These questions and more haunt us and the paintings. Ultimately, we’re left with more questions than answers. We can begin to feel the raindrops falling.
MICKEY LEE (b. 1996, Forest Grove, OR) lives and works in New York. Lee received an MA from the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, CA. Solo shows include Broadway (Easthampton, New York), One Trick Pony (Los Angeles), Half Gallery (New York), and The Journal Gallery (New York). Group exhibitions include The Journal Gallery (Patmos, Greece), Loyal (Los Angeles), Spazio Amanita (Los Angeles) and One Trick Pony (Los Angeles). She was name checked in The New York Times and Vanity Fair, and has been profiled in Muse magazine and on artnet.com.
