Maggie Lee’s Hand Dryer (2012) + Fall NYC (2014)
Hand Dryer (2012) and Fall NYC (2014) by Maggie Lee capture seemingly small, intimate gestures with a dream-like lucidity. Both works are available through March 9th, accompanied by a newly-commissioned text by artist Whitney Claflin, who writes, “in Maggie’s videos, documentary and fantasy play b2b sets—the mundane is transformed into the magical almost immediately, only to have the next frame bring an action right back into its earthly setting.”
Maggie Lee, Hand Dryer
2012, 0:28 min, color
The viewing period for this work has ended.
Maggie Lee’s Hand Dryer (2012) opens with a title that is as matter of fact as a Google Maps entry: “HAND DRYER AT MIB3 LOEWS THEATER UNION SQUARE 2012.” This expository note to the viewer cuts straight to Maggie’s notes to herself—ballpoint pen memos which undulate across her carpals and metacarpals beneath the blast of the bathroom fan. The unit’s blare is hushed by bops of electronic music and thrash vocals, cartooning the moment into a candy necklace-ish kind of slapstick. The sallow lighting of the public bathroom manages to flick a bit of her faded glitter manicure into sparkles and the hand becomes hypnotic, like a corporeal lava lamp.
One technique for inducing and harnessing lucid dreaming is to attempt to see your own hand; if you’re aware you’re dreaming and can locate your hand, you have consciousness in an unconscious state, and can even direct the action unfolding before you. Maggie’s hand slides into the frames of her videos in a similar way—we see it as both hers, and ours, giving a sense of agency to the dream state unfolding before us. And just as in a dream, time and capital are scaffolds rendered ridiculous; in Maggie’s videos, function is defined on her terms. The utility of the hand dryer is upended by her playful performance with it, teasing the air into a melting poem; a credit card is swiped and dropped into a sewer grate to never return in such a cute manner that the flippancy of the action is almost not registered.
Maggie Lee, Fall NYC
2014, 1:51 min, color
The viewing period for this work has ended.
In Maggie’s videos, documentary and fantasy play b2b sets—the mundane is transformed into the magical almost immediately, only to have the next frame bring an action right back into its earthly setting. In Fall NYC (2014), sound swerves across the scene as Maggie carries us with her around town. Blips of upbeat dance music ride over the visuals, woven un-Shazaamably with spoken words. Together, they pound aurally against skyscrapers, pavement, fingers, and faces, as frames freeze and release on the beat. For the viewer, something akin to fomo bubbles up, as drawings, screens, birds, and sandwiches fly past—you want to pause and look around longer but are already at the next party, meal, or page. With tender democracy, nondescript corridors and other interstitial places whip by, given as much weight as a friend’s body, an extracted tooth, a nice bar of soap, a landmark, or food. Maggie’s videos have a straightforwardness to setting, approaching the city à la GPS—its heavily-imaged history a radiant backdrop to her slices of life. When you're with Maggie, even the Empire State Building feels like a club, its lights flashing in sync with the soundtrack.
While Maggie and her camera traverse the Williamsburg Bridge toward lower Manhattan multiple times, the city folds in on itself temporally as the landscape strobes between day and night, a nod to the frequency of this trip back-and-forth over the bridge on a bike, in a cab, on a skateboard, on the train… The volley between destination and return becomes charged with romance, emptied completely of the anxious humdrum typically associated with commuting in New York.
Fall is a mood, an energy of change, a rush before the halt of winter. “Classic Fall vibes” like a backlit tree becoming bare, a flock of birds careening in a grey sky, photo books, and noodle soup flit amongst world-famous vistas and landmarks. Maggie shows us the most iconic New York minutes while retaining intensely personal, even cryptic moments too. Snapshots of languorous afternoons in a bedroom, cigarette breaks, and stick-and-poke tattoos, like zoom-ins on a map, funnel the hyperreal scale of the city into intimacy. The artist herself freezes within a mirror on the screen beaming a knowingly cheesy grin like a character in a Daria end-title. Maggie’s self-awareness allows her to be both producer and guide, showing you the city from her point of view, showing you how cheap fun can be in the most expensive city in the world. All you need is a hand-dryer in a public bathroom to begin your trip.
Whitney Claflin is an artist living and working in New York, NY.
Maggie Lee was born in 1987. She lives and works in New York. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Édouard Montassut, Paris; Arcadia Missa, London; Lomex, New York; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Real Fine Arts, New York; and LadyBug House, San Francisco. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Svetlana, New York; Shoot The Lobster, New York; Stadgalerie Bern, Bern, Switzerland; White Columns and Art Production Fund, New York; Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), New York; Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; Kai Matsumiya, New York; Kunstalle Zürich, Switzerland; T293, Rome, Italy; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Schloss, Oslo, Norway; Triple Canopy, New York; New Museum, New York; and Greene Naftali, New York.
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.