Dionne Lee navigates the complex terrain where landscape, survival, and memory collide, weaving together photography, collage, video, and sculpture to reveal hidden histories and embodied knowledge. Her work challenges dominant representations of the American wilderness by centering bodily skill, ancestral resilience, and the material traces embedded in land. Using analog processes such as darkroom manipulation, tearing, layering, and re-exposure, Lee deconstructs the photograph as both image and object. Her interventions disrupt the illusion of neutrality in landscape imagery, foregrounding themes of power, labor, and historical erasure. Survival techniques—like reading the stars, building shelter, or navigating terrain—inform both her process and conceptual framework. These gestures connect physical skill with cultural endurance, transforming acts of making into reflections on autonomy, displacement, and adaptation. Lee’s work resists fixed narratives, holding space for contradiction: land as both refuge and site of violence; the body as both vulnerable and resourceful. Through this tension, she opens up possibilities for reimagining belonging and reframing how histories are carried, resisted, and redefined. ...
