Young Jean Lee Exhibition

47 Canal

poster for Young Jean Lee Exhibition

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Writer/director Young Jean Lee, thus far known primarily for her work in theater, presents her two first short films. In both films, she explores a question that has run throughout all her work: “How do people deal with being born into the bodies they were born into?”

In HERE COME THE GIRLS, Young Jean Lee plays a bullying documentarian who invades the private life of an unemployed artist/musician named Joe. Spurred on by Joe’s discomfort, Young Jean aggressively pillages his world to create an unforgiving portrait of his life. The film is driven by a tension between Joe’s white male privilege and Young Jean’s privileged position as his director, resulting in an uneasy examination of what it means to have power and abuse it.

A MEANING FULL LIFE is a multi-part portrait of Sheikhar Boodram, a Puerto Rican/Guyanese teenager from the Bronx. It begins with a film adaptation of a script written by Sheikhar when he was fifteen, in which a wealthy white couple (Kate Valk and Wallace Shawn), trapped in a loveless marriage and desperately seeking meaning in their lives, discovers that they are both seeing the same therapist (Paul Lazar). After the film-within-a film, we meet Sheikhar at age seventeen, full of optimism as he discusses money, happiness, and the meaning of life. We meet him again two years later, following a dark period from which he emerged with a new source of meaning.

Screenings will be held during regular gallery hours.

Young Jean Lee is a writer, director, and filmmaker who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed ten shows in New York with Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, and toured her work to over thirty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays; The Shipment and Lear; and We’re Gonna Die) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and has written a screenplay commission for Plan B/Paramount Pictures. Her first short film, Here Come the Girls, was presented at The Locarno International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and BAMcinemaFest. In 2013, she released her debut album, We’re Gonna Die, with her band, Future Wife. Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Doris Duke Artist Residency, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, and the ZKB Patronage Prize of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.

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from November 18, 2015 to December 13, 2015

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