Art Metropole

#11919

162 People

Date

2015

Publisher

Presentation House Gallery

Format

Artists' Books

Size

5.5 × 7 inches

Length

162 pages

Genre

Photography

Description

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO PEOPLE is an artist book about history and circumstance.

Mining over a century of photographs, Lee’s book utilizes images of our modern era’s most iconic and eclectic public figures. Actors, authors, politicians, athletes, scientists, artists, musicians, designers, and religious leaders—from Mark Twain to John McEnroe, Jay-Z to Mother Teresa—are featured, a pair per page, in an unbroken chain of chance encounters, official meetings, and friendly snapshots.

In a carousel loop of 162 pairings, the book begins and ends with Andy Warhol, who is first seen standing with Muhammad Ali, then on the final page of the book with hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. Every new page contains an individual from the preceding page matched up with a new partner, forming a continuing sequence of prominent individuals meeting their seemingly random counterparts. Like Lee’s performative practice that imagines conversations between disparate cultural figures, the photographs proceed with both major and minor shifts in place and time, accumulating in an imaginative meditation on how distinct individuals might combine as part of a larger discourse.

Tim Lee is one of Canada’s most celebrated contemporary artists. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the DaaD Galerie, Berlin; Asia Society, New York; and the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. He has been included in the 2012 Shanghai Biennale, the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, the 2008 Sydney Biennial and the 3rd Yokohama Triennale. He is represented by Lisson Gallery in London/New York/ Milan, Johnen Galerie in Berlin and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich.

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