Waterman: Coloring the Stranger explores the variation of a stranger in a brand new place. Jiyoun Lee-Lodge started this sequence as a journal-like notation when she moved from New York to Utah, and struggled to settle in. The persona of Waterman acts as a stand-in for each private and common expertise whereas referencing popular culture, and themes of alienation and belonging. Lee-Lodge started this multi-year sequence by asking: “If I mimic what a really perfect life seems like in a brand new place, will I mix in properly?”

She illustrates herself as shifting water that repels, absorbs, displays – a determine struggling to discover a place inside its atmosphere. The comfortable aspen backgrounds replicate her notions of “a greater life” in Utah, traced in a fragile skinny line as if it’d dissolve into the scene when the viewer loses focus.

Impressed by Edward Hopper’s works, Lee-Lodge continued to discover displacement, anxiousness, and isolation all through the pandemic. She was confined to her home, experiencing absolute solitude and loneliness in an area meant to offer consolation. She mediated her entry to the surface world by a display – a digital window – that acted as each a method of connection and a supply of alienation. A window that opens to extra: concepts, info, the deluge of emojis, and the exhausting cacophony of what Bo Burham calls “something and all the pieces all the time.”

Lee-Lodge navigates alienation attributable to the pursuit of a really perfect life. Within the movie “Pleasantville” the story begins in black-and-white, reflecting an ideal, excellent, and impassive world. As the first character opens themselves to feeling, the world turns to paint little by little. Lee-Lodge attracts a parallel between her means of “coloring” the Waterman to an acceptance and transcendence of her hope for lively and open communication amongst individuals, similar to the movie. 

The present is curated in collaboration with Fashionable West.