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Nikki S. Lee's Parts at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks
by Suzanne Wulach
If any viewer is not stunned upon first entering "Parts," it is a safe bet that he knows of Cindy Sherman. Nikki S. Lee's work shamelessly alludes to that of her feminist predecessor; both artists photograph themselves, and both take special pains to imbue their photographs with this self-awareness. "Parts" notably shares its cinematic, softly questioning quality with Sherman's "film stills." Yet Lee's work transcends this similarity, integrating and morphing the borrowed ingredients to form something completely different.
Unlike Lee's earlier photographs (work that, like Sherman's examined the definitions of different social roles), "Parts" looks at the conflicts between longing and belonging, passivity and power, sympathy and numbness. In each photograph, Lee assumes a different persona: that of a woman jilted or happy or aching for change. Though Lee most likely arranged the shots, her assistant pressed the button, and so most of the compositional decisions were made in the editing room. The most noticeable of these is the choice to crop the man out of every picture, suggesting that the arm cut off physically from the body is cut off emotionally from the woman it so lovingly holds. To increase this feeling of disjointedness, Lee has framed each of her photographs only on three sides, thus allowing one to meld into the next in a somehow coherent non-sequitur.
This unique framing creates a fine effect, but some find it too obvious a proclamation of the artist's intent: cut off frames communicate quite literally that "Parts" is partially about being cut off from relationships. Yet this device not only suggests a connected disconnect but also enhances the feeling of off-kilter reality, and thus seems overwhelmingly worthwhile. However, Lee's predilection for the obvious does not work so well all the time. In many of her photographs, the subject wears her disenchantment on her face, looking with pained eyes up or down, almost shouting her yearning into the viewer's ear. In one photograph, a disheveled and nearly naked Lee looks dazedly and discontentedly off into the distance and away from the bound male arm behind her. The crushing vulnerability that Lee displays here appeared and worked well in Cindy Sherman's "film stills," as it is more suited to her mockery of traditional female roles. In Lee's work it seems not out of place but too harmonious: the one quiet, understandable element in an exhibit meant to be disquieting. Anyone would carry a piercing, wistful expression in the eerie, film-like environment Lee has created. The photographs in which Lee is smiling are much more substantial. In one photograph, a giddy and powerless Lee is being twirled in the air by the male presence behind her. The exuberance of the subject is juxtaposed so forcefully and successfully with the cropped man in the background that the feeling appropriately elicited by the work shows on the face of the viewer rather than on the face of the actor. He does not quite empathize with Lee's character, though he can relate her adopted persona to his own. He fights back his impulse to smirk cynically at the subject's plaintive looks, knowing full well the futility of trying to belong in the days of generation X. He can barely even justify his yearning to become part of the pictured world where everything is slick and cool and being out of place is so becoming. Instead, the viewer is lost in a muddle of these thoughts, and his wish to comprehend his reaction seems to be the very response Lee intended. With this display of confused desire the viewer has exhibited his understanding of the world the artist depicts, a world where longing is so intense and unspoken that it breaks everything else up in a jumble of parts.
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