Josephine Lee
BIPOC Residency Award Winner and Worldings Residency Co-hort: Onsite Artist
Statement
“My project focuses on redesigning police and military body armour as poetic armatures for people of colour to embody in performative gestures of resilience and resistance against state power. Through this residency, I wish to use the available facilities and resources to prototype articulating paper, fabric, and polymer clay pieces and perform with them.
The project emerges from the real-world application of ceramics and steel plates within ballistic armour used by military and police. These plates are known within the industry as “trauma plates”. I wish to address the irony of this terminology in relation to the individual and collective trauma that state control has upon bodies of colour. As well, I wish to take this form of protection given to military and police forces and to reimagine it for people of colour. I plan to do this by pulling from blueprints and technical specifications of commercially manufactured armour plates, designing my own shoulder, wrist, and breastplate armour pieces, and using these to record instructional gestures of resilience and care. This project seeks to address how we can reorient racialized trauma to build individual and collective resilience and confront the violence, trauma, and precarity through movements of healing and dialogues of BIPOC and queer futurities.
I believe that I have arrived at a crucial juncture within my research where my work requires institutional support. By working in this residency and engaging with Griffin Art Projects’ programming, I plan to break open the potentials my research holds, and develop essential creative work into the urgent conditions of race, power, and technology that we currently face.” - Josephine Lee
Bio
“Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes sculpture, new media, installation, and performance, as well as an educational background in both the sciences and arts, my work explores the psychic violence of cultural assimilation and the conditions that inform our understanding of place, citizenship, and national identity. From this groundwork, my practice has led me to question how technology plays a part in reinforcing the violence of nation states, racist economic policies, and human dispossession.
I hold graduate and undergraduate degrees in science and fine arts, and have exhibited in Canada and the United States, as well as performed at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. Recently, I was awarded the Oscar Kolin Fellowship, the Vera G. List Sculpture Award, and a Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Award at the BANFF Centre for Arts and Creativity. I am an MFA in Fine Arts graduate from Parsons, The New School of Art, Media, and Technology. I currently lecture at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. I respectfully acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. “ - Josephine Lee
http://www.jjosephine.com/
