The High Wall: 2022
Projection dates: July 21-24, 2022
Screening dusk to midnight
Patio viewing hours: Thursday July 21 and Sunday July 24
9:30 - 11pm
Inscape Arts Building
815 Seattle Boulevard South | Seattle WA 98134
Curated by: Kelly Lee Webeck and Jesse Egner of Strange Fire Collective
Exhibiting artists: Brandon Tho Harris, Julie Lee, and Kei Ito
The High Wall 2022—in partnership with Strange Fire Collective— presented three video works projected on the facade of the Inscape Arts Building in Seattle, WA. Inscape resides in a former immigration detention center; because of the building’s history we selected artists whose work explore broad ideas of immigration, diaspora, and borderlands. We are proud to have chosen Kei Ito, Brandon Tho Harris, and Julie Lee - three artists who examine these themes through the use of photography and the moving image. Although each piece is presented as a video, the artists each utilize the medium and materiality of still photography. Photograms, a vernacular family photo archive, and glitched google map images each make connections about migration, place, community, family, and home.
Interviews with the artists were shared on Strange Fire Collective throughout the month of August:
Kei Ito interview
Brandon Tho Harris interview
Julie Lee interview
This exhibition was curated by photographer and visual arts educator Kelly Lee Webeck (@rocketfacedweeb) and artist and educator Jesse Egner (@jesseegner) of Strange Fire Collective.
Brandon Tho Harris is an interdisciplinary artist and arts professional based in Houston, Texas. His creative practice explores his identity as a child of war refugees. Through intensive research on the Vietnamese diaspora in relation to his family history, he examines notions of intergenerational trauma, displacement, and the land as a living archive. Found in his work are often self-portraiture, his family archives, found objects, raw materials, and historical images portraying the Vietnam war. By the use of photography, video, performance, and installation, he provides viewers with a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding migration.
Kei Ito is a visual artist working primarily with camera-less photography and installation art who is currently teaching at the International Center of Photography (ICP). Ito received his BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. By excavating and uncovering hidden histories connected to his own, Ito utilizes his generational past to use as a case study for contemporary and future events. Many of Ito’s artworks transforms both art and non-art spaces into temporal monuments that became platforms for the audience to explore social issues and the memorials dedicated to the losses suffered from the consequences of those issues. Within these intertwined pasts, Ito shines a light on power and its relationship to larger global issues that often led to and result in both war and peace alike.
Julie Lee (she/her) is a Korean-American artist from Alabama residing in Pittsburgh, PA. Her lens-based works (primarily collage and photography) explore themes of ancestry and the photograph as existential affirmation. These works have circulated nationally and internationally, encouraging new ways of seeing and representing ideas in contemporary image culture, of being seen, and of speculating historical, psychological reconstructions.
