Summer Mei Ling Lee x Laura Boles Faw, An Atlas of Absence II, 2020, Zoom Meeting Performance, 20 min. duration. Date and time to be announced.
Technology was supposed to connect us. The dominant modality for communication and connection during this pandemic era is the digital screen. In this work, collaborators Laura Boles Faw and Summer Mei Ling Lee continue their ongoing series addressing distance and longing that increasingly figures into this heightened moment. Through the Zoom platform, they host an encounter in which guests to the “meeting” confront the artists grappling with the boundaries of absence and presence, here and there, time and the infinite through an arch of emotions and strategies ranging from coincidence to confusion. Through this work, they ask if we can meaningfully meet in a place that documents the deprivation of being together without altering our understanding of closeness and connection.
About the Artists
Summer Mei Ling Lee and Laura Boles Faw began to work together in late 2016 in the Bay Area to address the universal human need for deeper connection. After Boles Faw moved to Philadelphia two years ago, the two have more emphatically and yet poetically critiqued the effects of ever-quickening and often superficial technological communication through performative and often participatory projects and installations.
SUMMER MEI LING LEE is a multi-media artist who graduated from Stanford University in 1997 and received her MFA in painting and sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011. Recent exhibitions include Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco); Saatchi Gallery, London; Marqueyssac, France; Untitled Art Fair “Monuments;” Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco; SCOPE Miami Beach (Art Basel); Berliner Liste; Italian Institute of Culture; San Francisco Arts Commission; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); Southern Exposure (San Francisco); Woman-Made Gallery (Chicago); and Fei Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai). Her recent public art installation, “Liminal Space/Crossings,” funded by the NEA, was a finalist for the Robert E. Gard Award and the subject of a documentary film screened at CAAMfest 2018. Lee was recently interviewed and featured in Hyperallergic magazine for her installation Requiem, which pays homage to Hong Kong’s Tung Wah Hospital’s role in the repatriation of Chinese immigrant bones to China. Lee’s research of the bone boxes in Hong Kong and Taishan, China is featured in a documentary film, Requiem. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen, China.
Laura Boles Faw’s work consists of investigations through sculptures, installations, drawings and mixed-media works. She examines the ways we prop ourselves up in the world and borrows from art historical references in order to create new meanings and transformative fictions. In addition to her solo practice, she collaborates with several artists through discursive and ongoing projects.
Boles Faw has recently exhibited in the Bay Area at [ 2nd floor projects ], The Contemporary Jewish Museum, The Chinese Culture Center, Minnesota Street Project, Scrawl Center for Drawing, Meridian Gallery, MAX Occupancy, Alter Space Gallery, Kala Art Institute, Royal NoneSuch Gallery, Root Division, and Ever Gold Gallery. Additionally she has exhibited at Ms. Barbers, Los Angeles, CA; Practice Space, Cambridge, MA; Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, CA; James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA; and Vast Space Projects, Las Vegas, NV. Boles Faw was named SBC-VCCA Teaching Fellow to teach at Sweet Briar College while in residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in August/September 2019. She has also been in residence in LongLi, China where she was commissioned to make a permanent public work for the Second (Longli) International New Media Art Season, and at Kala Art Institute and LOOP Arts in the Bay Area. She is a recipient of a California Arts Council Artist Activating Communities Grant with the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco.
Boles Faw received a BA in Art History from Sewanee and an MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute where she held the position of Lecturer in the Sculpture Department from 2012-2018. She recently relocated from San Francisco to Philadelphia.