About Lee Henderson

STATEMENT OF PRACTICE

Mine is a making practice marked by the persistence of collective histories and the brevity of individual lives... which is to say it's funny, in the same way King Lear is funny.

I'm interested in understanding problems, with an awareness that the work of the artist lies in revealing false problems rather than solving real ones. But whether investigating problems of definition or perception, or of measurement or identification, existential crises or mundane anxieties, I have so far found that they all collapse back to the central problem of the terminus, that presumed point of ambiguous inevitability we spend our conscious lives avoiding, or from which we supposedly sprang. This doesn't have to mean the beginning/end of a particular human life—it can as easily be the disappearance of a culture, the retrofitting of an edifice, the emergence of a language, or the transition between weather patterns. And like an electron or a fable, when examined with care, the terminus problem-point reveals itself to be permeable, mutable, and indiscernible.

Throughout this process I stumble, I grope; I latch on to a piece of material, or an historical factoid, or the cultural baggage of an object, or a quirk of language, and become fascinated-obsessed until it reveals the mortal banality of its associations. Those associations—networks of human intellectual-emotional investment, more commonly known as "meaning"—then find expression in reconfigurations of light, text, space, sound, and matter. Making an artwork is every bit as absurd, direct, and fruitful as rearranging furniture just to see the pattern on the floor.

BIO

I was born and raised on the Canadian prairies, and remain convinced that there's no better place to contemplate nothingness. When the landscape is just a single horizontal slash between blue and yellow, absence becomes a constant comfort; when the wind is cold enough to make you need other people on a mortal level, absence becomes a terror realized.
(Isn't it curious how place shapes us?)

My earliest recollection is of falling through a garage roof when I was two years old, and I can still distinctly recall the pink fibreglass that I had thought was solid but which failed to support my weight. However, on returning to that garage decades later, I found that the insulation was and had always been yellow, and covered in black tar-paper anyway.
(Isn't it curious how memory betrays us?)

I am a contemporary artist whose practice includes video, photography, installation, sculpture, performance, and text. I studied art in Canada and Germany, holding a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2003) and an MFA from the University of Regina (2005). I show regularly across Canada, and occasionally in Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Naples, and Berlin; notable recent venues include The Phillips Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Magenta Festival Boston, and The Zero Film Festival (USA); The Dunlop Art Gallery, The Mendel Art Gallery, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, Nuit Blanche Edmonton, and YYZ Artists' Outlet (Canada); and kunstraum tapir, Berlin (Germany).

My work can be found in private and public collections including the Mendel Art Gallery/Remai Modern, the University of Regina President's Collection, the Telus Corporate Collection, and The Center for Fine Art Photography USA. I have taught art at Universities across Canada, most recently in Toronto at OCAD University and Toronto Metropolitan University.

I am represented by Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto.