'Evan Lee’s photographs are concerned with the possibility of the irrational, that which is ‘not endowed with reason or understanding’. His images often capture a rather prosaic material in a way that suggests otherworldliness and his interests lie in ‘the inherent confusion within the threshold of that which is real and that which is represented and perceived.’ He believes this notion to be at the core of understanding the evolving role of photography in our culture.

In the series Stellar Curves, the French curve, a traditional draughting instrument is ‘photographed’ with a scanner in a technique that relates more closely to the photograms of such early experimenters as Thomas Wedgewood and W.H. Fox Talbot. Reminiscent of plant or animal forms, the curves are deliberately positioned so that foreground and background are equally weighted and the anthropomorphic shapes recall images such as the nature studies of Karl Blossfeldt from the early 20th century and Frank Stella’s Exotic Bird abstract works from the 1970’s. The extremely high resolution and long exposure time highlights any and all marks on the curve itself, as well as picking up particles in the surrounding air, lending a terrific depth to the work while creating an interplay between abstract forms and real space.

In other work such as the Stains series, the artist has focused his camera on the puddles of water and automobile fuel that form on pavement. They are a disregarded, stunningly beautiful phenomenon that for the artist reflects the ‘cosmic possibilities of the skies above’. Throughout his practice, Lee draws the viewer’s attention to the banal and the universal simultaneously, succeeding in creating a powerful juxtaposition between knowledge and mystery.

http://www.evanlee.ca/