If you had to define your idea of home in one sentence, could you do it? Could you communicate how you belong and feel whole in this place as efficiently as possible? In Josephine Lee’s exhibition, Practice until you feel the language inside you, the artist utilizes the tools of futility and humor to challenge the rules in which connection to environment, culture, and citizenship are established and known. Lee has taken up residence throughout the United States, South Korea, and is currently based in Canada within the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Currently on view at Unrequited Leisure Gallery, Lee’s work I think I Canada I know I Canada, displays the artist with an oversized banner in a vast snowy landscape where she works towards and against displaying the banner in its entirety. 

Named in partial reference to the children’s story about labor and ethics, The Little Engine That Could, Lee’s title of the video and performance work comments on the nature of language and how the mastery of it can be a disingenuous marker of cultural acceptance and inclusion within a national identity. Importantly, the title of the work, I think I Canada I know I Canada, is purposeful in its grammatical errors. To build upon this titling choice, as Lee runs across the scene from right to left in the video, the entirety of the banner and its text is never seen because the artist cannot quite run fast enough nor does she have the aid of wind or inclines within the landscape for the banner to fully take flight. Her communication thus remains intentionally unclear here too. To further obscure the text, Lee deliberately tangles with the banner and swings and arcs the fabric in quick gestures. Eventually, her movements slow and her exasperation is audible. Lee reckons with a symbolic form of lived experience in a landscape that has no distinct markers or vegetation to locate the artist in time and place; the transferability of the environment pivots Lee’s individual movements into actions that other bodies take on as well. Her labor in this ubiquitous location references more broadly the effort of immigrant communities to manifest acceptance in places they call home and the artist questions if language dexterity or hard work could ever usher true feelings of belonging.

See more of Josephine Lee’s work here: www.jjosephine.com

Josephine Lee, I think I Canada, I know I Canada, stills from performance video, 13:21m, 2018