Dionne Lee’s ‘Currents’ Offers a Taste of Searching Without a Destination

Dionne Lee’s art casts a spell.

My first encounter with her work, a few years ago, remains unforgettable. In addition to samplings of Lee’s signature brand of raw, no-frills darkroom photography, the exhibition included a sculpture made from strips of cotton fabric tied between two wooden dowels, the ends of which were balanced on stacks of rocks. The sagging fabric of the improvised stretcher hovered just barely above the floor. This delicate tension of the almost imperceptible space between edges was vertigo-inducing, mesmerizing.

Earlier this year, I encountered Lee’s work again, in the 2024 edition of the Whitney Biennial. That piece is a video showing the artist’s hands holding two dowsing rods — sticks used to locate groundwater — aimlessly wandering an expansive field. Again, the effect was transcendence, a meditative and intoxicating antidote to hype.

Lee’s latest exhibition, Currents, at the Mission District space Cushion Works, is a spare and spacious offering of three brief black-and-white videos and five silver gelatin prints, all untitled. The gallery space is dark; the videos play on CRT monitors on low pedestals, casting pools of light on the floor at their bases. The photos are small and individually spotlit. The presentation and the work are simultaneously restrained and expansive, an apt parallel to humanity’s fleeting existence within the geologic timescale versus our outsized impact on the planet.

All of the work in Currents was made in collaboration with the natural environment, in a ravine a brief walk from Lee’s house in Columbus, Ohio, where she spends hours at a time documenting her performative gestures with a film camera and handheld camcorder. Only this documentation remains, the gestures themselves vanishing from the site of their creation almost immediately.

The longest video, at around 19 minutes, features a handful of slow, panning shots, tracking a spiral of white string as it floats on the surface of a shallow creek. The camera cuts only when the string is on the verge of unraveling from its spiral form, which, spoiler alert, it does at the very end, stretching out across the water in a wavering line. This cycle of expansion and contraction, negotiating the limits of human control over the natural environment, is reminiscent of meditative breathing. The final shot is an exhalation, a relinquishing of control to Lee’s natural collaborator.

Another video is a static shot of a large, flat stone, over which Lee continually spins a forked stick like a dowsing rod or divination tool, its spinning shadow echoing the spiral motif. Her hand remains out of frame, occasionally flickering into view. Here again, the tension between human intervention and natural course is evident.

Lee’s practice hovers somewhere between a conservative brand of land art and performance documentation, in company with Andy Goldsworthy’s dust drawings, Ana Mendieta’s impressions in grass and Robert Smithson’s photographs of overturned rocks — all artworks that were eventually overtaken by nature.

A series of three photographs, Untitled Rock Drawing III, dot the gallery walls. Each shows a spiral drawn in water on the surface of a flat rock, the drawing fading more and more in the direct sunlight, leaving only the photographs behind. These pictures read almost like stills from a video in their own right, inviting the viewer to pace their own experience as they move through the gallery, activating Lee’s magic trick of manipulating time.

Lee recently participated in two projects connecting artists with the outdoors, which informed the work in Currents. The first was a Land Arts of the American West residency, which involved a two-month camping trip across the Southwest to famous land art locations — from Michael Heizer’s Double Negative to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty — and a nuclear test site. She was also an “artist researcher” in Unseen California’s inaugural cohort, an initiative through the University of California Santa Cruz that “engages the public land of California as an outdoor artist studio and classroom laboratory.”

Lee says she’s still processing these experiences in her work. “I spent two months living outdoors and now I’m home and I’m drawing spirals on rocks,” she says, laughing.

And it’s this process of exploration and examination that the image of the spiral evokes, the circular logic of endless questioning turning in on itself.

“It’s not about finding anything,” Lee says. “It’s just about the act of searching or looking.”

But the lack of a clear destination doesn’t necessarily make a search purposeless.

One mystical parallel to this kind of artistic practice would be apophatic theology, also known as negative theology. The practice, common in Christian mysticism, attempts to define God by everything that they are not, the idea being that what remains in relief of the infinite “not” is the closest we can come to defining the divine.

Lee’s work evokes the sublime tradition in landscape art, an embodied conceptual experience “prioritizing another level of experience and understanding and knowledge,” she says. Here, it is cosmic and geological at once, containing both light years and deep time, expanding the definition of landscape photography to metaphysical considerations. The topographies in Currents are the contours of a divine experience that borders the limits of human comprehension.

‘Currents’ is on view at Cushion Works (3320 18th St., San Francisco) through Aug. 10, 2024.