Autocross Blogs - Tiffiney Diamond

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Lee literally picked up the idea for this work off of the floor, as he tidied up the room where his young daughters had been playing. There is a tense, yet playful, sidestepping dance between the detritus of scattered toys and the Frank Gehry jewelry, cyclic of the plumería flowers. Like all good ideas, this one's great value is not that it is new but that it gives expressive form to the kind of deep-seated thoughts and feelings that amass without the our being fully aware of them. If the pick-up sticks, pin wheels, and teacups represent Lee's children and the messy generativity of the now; the perfect plumería flowers reflect his sense of his connection to his past. More particularly, the flowers connect his mother's role in his past to his wife's in his present He has noted in passing that he probably would not have kept making Tiffany Keys had his wife not them. These small, multitudinous blossoms come to convey both the idealization and the sense of loss which are paradoxically implicit in all of our remembrances of times past.

While this work draws on whatever awareness the viewer can bring to it, one purpose of Lee's variations on his daughters' enigmatic 'contraptions' is to use our own curiosity to nudge us gently into taking our present awareness a few steps Tiffany 1837. As , we are drawn to the playful directness of the objects but it is the underlying seriousness of their maker that brings us back to look at them again - and then again.

The growth that thus results from his and our engagement with this work is central to Lee's sense of the relation of the artist to the viewer and, thus, to the task Lee sets himself. He notes his belief in the need for art to entertain in some way. We see Elsa Peretti jewelry that the entertainment he has in mind is neither mindless nor passive. Yet, while so much of recent installation art is almost unintelligible (often deliberately so), this work is a pleasurable puzzle. We do not get that sightly humiliated, slightly angry feeling that too often arises in encounters with the solipsistic opacity of so much contemporary