It has been said that it is impossible to take a bad photograph of Iceland. While this is quite possibly true, Henderson takes this prompt as a dare. Photography as a once-specialized medium is currently struggling to redefine its identity in the midst of its own ubiquity and the “idea” of Iceland, meanwhile, is also in existential tumult, as tourism explodes and a digitally imaged Iceland (read: romanticized, aestheticized, selective) circulates ever more prominently online. To Step From Shadow Into the Warmth of the Sun is an interrogation of the mimetic impulse; an exhibition fuelled by media's curious ability to collapse time and space as it seeks to measure them; an unearthing of the ontological consequences of The Travelogue; and a suspicion that "presence", however alluring, is always unrepresentable.
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Lee Henderson is a contemporary artist whose practice includes video, photography, installation, sculpture, performance, and text. His work moves in constant contemplation of death, in senses grand and minute, between the persistence of collective histories and the brevity of individual lives… but it’s funny, the way “King Lear” is funny.
Lee studied art in Canada and Germany, with a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2003) and an MFA from the University of Regina (2005). He teaches art and media in Toronto at OCAD and Ryerson.
Recent projects include "Fixing a Novel by Removing all the Adjectives", a single, mirror-polished brick in a cellar somewhere under Berlin (Kunstraum Tapir, Berlin, 2014); "The Known Effects of Lightning on the Body", an installed projection of burning matches that “bow” as they exhaust themselves (YYZ, 2014; The Rooms, 2015; Nuit Blanche Edmonton, 2015); and "Palliative Care (1985-1992)", an installation featuring a supercut of every reference to death in TV’s “The Golden Girls” (Latitude53, 2016). Henderson was the recipient of the CONTACT 2016 Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso Prize for "Never Letting Us Take Breath", an automated slide-lecture and installation of photographs offering a meditation on the photo-archive and human mortality (Zalucky Contemporary, 2016). In 2017 he was Visiting Artist at Open Studio Toronto, and Canadian Artist in Residence at Glenfiddich Distillery, Dufftown, Scotland.
