Jiyoun Lee-Lodge Waterman: Changing I

“I cannot go out, so I sit in the room.

The window that I access the world through is my phone screen,

which also confines me. The information I see in it, true and false, floods my world.

My belief system changes fast as I try to form myself in this sea.

It spins so rapidly, though, that I feel frozen.”

—Jiyoun Lee-Lodge

Waterman: Changing I is part of an ongoing series by Lee-Lodge that explores displacement, anxiety, and isolation in relationship to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past year, Lee-Lodge, like countless others, has been confined to her house, experiencing absolute solitude and loneliness in a space meant to provide comfort. Her access to the outside world was mediated through a screen, or as she calls it, “a digital window” that acted as both a means of connection and a source of alienation. This window opens to the excess noise of opposing ideas; the gut of images, information, the deluge of likes, dislikes, hearts, emojis, and the exhausting cacophony of what Bo Burham calls, “anything and everything all of the time.”

The window, though, also acts as a wave, that crashes completely covering the Lee-Lodge’s figures, masking their faces and their forms, overtaking them. The liquid is constantly in flux, as are the emotional states of the figures. Lee-Lodge plays out this duality in her compositions, using dramatic, strong contrasts between light and dark, a technique dating back to the Renaissance called chiaroscuro. Her works also draw on early 1980’s video game landscapes and color palettes and take influence from both Roy Lichtenstein’s bitmapping and flatness as well as Edward Hopper’s social isolation and existentialism.