The Sobey Art Award is Canada's leading visual-art prize and its aim is to throw a spotlight every year on the work of one of this country's most promising emerging artists. So when the announcement was made in the Royal Ontario Museum's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal in Toronto last Wednesday night that this year's prize money ($50,000) has gone to the Vancouver artist Tim Lee, the moment held a subtle irony. As emerging artists go, you'd have to say Tim Lee is about as emerged as they come.
Making work in the large-format Cibachrome photo medium of the international A-list (he also makes video and sculpture), Lee has already leapfrogged over the Canadian gallery system to find representation in the leading commercial galleries of the United States and Europe (Cohan & Leslie in New York, Johnen + Schottle in Cologne and Lisson Gallery in London). The 32-year-old is one of Canada's most internationally acclaimed rising stars, his talents developed in a local art scene that some outsiders see as insufferably self-valorizing and others see as admirably supportive and nurturing. (The truth lies halfway between the two.) Following in the traditions of his hometown elders Jeff Wall, Ken Lum (who taught Lee at the University of British Columbia), Rodney Graham, Stan Douglas and Ian Wallace, his art is deeply rooted in the conceptual-art tradition of the seventies, but freshly minted with his own inquisitive and eccentric wit.
Competition for the award was stiff, with other contenders including the brilliant Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow, who enthralled his Toronto audience last Tuesday afternoon with a performance titled Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, involving his live narration and a sequence of multi-part cartoon drawings illuminated by an overhead projector. (The story involved the artist's fictitious account of his childhood days, a complex meditation on vision, loneliness and personal identity.) As well, Lee was up against the New York-based Canadian Terence Koh (a.k.a. asianpunkboy), whose stylish white-on-white installations and bad-boy posturing have made him a darling of the international art press.
Sitting down to talk just moments after the announcement, Lee was still carrying the champagne bottle that someone had given him and looking a little startled. Notwithstanding his many successes, he has the quiet, slightly introverted air of a scholar pulled involuntarily from the stacks of a library to blink in the spotlight.
I had a few practical questions about the work in the gallery upstairs, where the ROM is showcasing works by Lee and the other shortlisted candidates. One of his large two-part photographic works from 2006, titled Untitled (Neil Young, 1969) is a self-portrait of Lee playing an electric guitar, his slope-shouldered pose echoing Young's trademark stance. Lee's body, though, is pictorially segmented into its upper and lower parts, which are framed separately. Close inspection reveals that the grey band running vertically up the left side in the two shots is actually a concrete floor, snaked over with electrical cords. Correct for this and look at the pictures sideways, though, and Lee's body is now hovering parallel to this floor.
Did he use digital manipulation to produce this gravity-defying effect? No, he explains, he shot the work in two parts, so that the upper and lower parts of his body, respectively, could be supported off-camera. It's a photograph that lies, suggesting the simultaneity of one take when, in fact, it's the product of two.
This approach to photography - taking an instrument assumed to be truth telling and making it bend reality - is of a piece with Lee's Vancouver roots, whether one thinks of Jeff Wall's digital manipulations for his giant backlit Cibachromes or Rodney Graham's flamboyant looping narratives and sly simulations of historic materials. In fact, it is Graham's precedent that prevails here, particularly clear in Lee's incisive suite of artistic responses to Glenn Gould's performance of the Goldberg Variations, which are also included in the ROM show.
Taking on a piece of classic Canadiana (Gould's performance of Bach's Aria is the canonical performance by the great Canadian classical musician), Lee wrings fresh meaning. "Gould performed the work in the studio and submitted the recording to many edits. He felt that the musical artist of the 20th century had to be a master of the keyboard and of the editing suite as well. His career is a model of how to constantly rejuvenate your practice."
At the ROM, viewers can see his 2007 two-screen work titled The Goldberg Variations, Aria BWV 988, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1741, (Glenn Gould, 1981). It records, or seems to record, a two-handed performance of the famous passage of music. (The screens simply show, respectively, Lee's right and left hand playing.) Immediately, though, one can see that Lee's performance is fictive, the result of myriad edits made to excise the errors.
Lee doesn't play the piano, or any instrument ("I'm completely talentless," he exults), though classical music was a big part of his family life. "We definitely grew up with it," he told me. "We appreciated music. My sister actually became an elementary-school music teacher. When I told her that I wanted to make this piece, she said it couldn't be done."
A framed musical score hanging next to the videos reveals the hundreds of edits required to produce a convincing aural facsimile of Gould's original. To make this work, Lee has needed to have nearly as much precision and fanaticism as an editor as Gould had as a pianist and studio musician.
In an adjacent case, Lee is also showing a black-and-white record jacket that he has designed in period-perfect faux-1950s style and with it the two 45 rpm records of Lee's edited right- and left-hand performances. It's the kind of mimicry beloved by Rodney Graham, who similarly likes to infect historic texts or other literary and art-historical relics from the past with his own creative virus.
"Afterness," for want of a real word, is one of the distinguishing hallmarks of Vancouver art, I say to Lee - that heightened, self-conscious sense of the artist slipping into the footsteps of earlier artists, whether they be French 19th-century painters like Édouard Manet or the canonical makers of American conceptual art like Dan Graham, whose impact on Vancouver art has been paramount. Lee (however subjectively) reprises Gould, and Gould (however subjectively) has reprised Bach - a set of performances nesting one inside the other stretching back into the 18th century, with room for interpretation, intervention and distortion in each reiteration.
I ask Lee how he accounts for this learned preoccupation with precedent in Vancouver art, and we talk about the strength of the art and art history departments at UBC where he did his MFA work, and the vitality of the discussion about art that goes on in the city at large. "The only place I ever get nervous about giving a talk is in Vancouver," Lee says with a laugh. "You really have to bring your A-game."
He cites art history professor John O'Brian, artist Ken Lum and also Scott Watson as important mentors. (Watson is director/curator of the Belkin Art Gallery at UBC and also the West Coast juror in this year's Sobey selection panel.)
"I trained originally as a graphic designer at University of Alberta," Lee says, "but then I went one night to hear a talk at the Edmonton Art Gallery and heard Stan Douglas speak. That's really the reason I became an artist. He was the smartest individual I had ever heard and he made me think that I was contributing to the same glib cultural climate that he was critiquing. So I decided to do something about it."
The Sobey Art Award 2008 exhibition remains on view until Monday at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (www.rom.on.ca) .