Weed series is a collection of portraits of wild plants that grow in alleys and empty lots, whose resilience and poignant beauty I admire. I am interested in drawing attention to ordinary scenes and moments that are ephemeral and yet persistent.
A Great Piece of Turf and Jin Lee’s Weeds Photographs
By Cauleen Smith
Meadow grass, plantain, speedwell and daisy leaves, dandelions with slightly pink stems, flowering grasses, borage, and that ambitious yarrow shooting upwards on the brink of full bloom. I am describing the Jin Lee photo print that hangs in my bedroom. But I could very well be describing the exquisite drawing Albrecht Durer completed in 1503, A Great Piece of Turf. It’s just a little watercolor and gouache drawing commanded with earnestness and fidelity that Durer maybe wedged between commissions from popes, bankers, and kings. I mean, who commissions a great painter to paint them a patch of grass? No one, that’s who. It was painted because it was seen with a depth that demanded acknowledgement----a response. This act of looking at humble living things and their willful wildness seems to be a characteristic of great artists throughout time. When I first encountered Jin Lee's Weeds series, I thought of Durer’s Turf, and I’ve found it very difficult all these years later to disentangle the artists despite the vastness between their ways and reasons for making an image. As I slide through time and space between a renaissance drawing and a contemporary photograph, I’ve decided that these convolutions haves to do with what happens when I look at Lee’s work.
…Stillness… is not the right word because I am moved by the willfulness of the dandelion roots burrowing past cement and asphalt into the earth. The unvalued force of life of the budding yarrow fills me with ecstatic, albeit quiet, energy. Everyone else has walked by; except maybe twice a year a when a weedwacker swings through to erase the fruit of the root. But Jin Lee does not walk by. She kneels before the patch of borage and clover that has wedged itself between concrete and stucco, and she directs her lens to admire the lives of overlooked[1] things. Lately I’ve been trying to decolonize my relationship with our planet. These efforts made something else happen when I look at Jin Lee’s Weedsthrough the ontologies of the peoples[2] who inhabited Chicago and the surrounding lands before rivers ran backwards, and skyscrapers murdered migrating birds. I realize that stillness is really slowness, and this thing we call a dandelion is one of our plant relatives who share the city with us. So, I am no longer looking at a landscape, or a botanical study, or a still life, or a document. I am looking at a portrait. A family portrait of interlocked intertwined plants that share an eternal life-drive. And then, I finally come to understand that what I love about Jin Lee’s Weeds is also what I love about humans who inspire and sustain me, in their willful, bright, prickly, flowering determination to just live when the world would rather that they just not.
Catalog essay for Views & Scenes exhibition, Chicago Cultural Center, 2022
[1] Looking at the Overlooked by Norman Bryson, 1990.
[2] Council of the Three Fires--comprised of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations--as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois Nations.
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California.