OPA Live! is an Instagram Live series that features Pittsburgh-based cultural producers in conversation with their peers in other locations nationally and internationally. For the third session of this season of OPA Live!, we welcome our host, artist Julie Lee and her guest, artist and visual journalist, Selina Lee.
Documentative media has a reputation for flattening story subjects through imagery, especially those belonging to traditionally marginalized groups. In this session of OPA Live!, host Julie Lee, whose artistic practice focuses on historical and psychological reconstruction, is joined by artist and visual journalist Selina Lee to discuss examples of these representations within the journalism and contemporary art industries. Breaking down racialized and exoticized visual tropes, they consider how artists working beyond stereotypical depictions can carve out a space of their own.
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 seeing and being seen, as well as speculating historical, psychological reconstructions.
Her work has been exhibited in Columbia University’s PostCrypt Gallery, the Curated Fridge, and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Her work has also been featured in publications such as the Journal of Art Criticism, Yale University’s Asterisk* Journal of Art and Art History, and Hyperallergic.
Selina Lee is an artist and visual journalist whose current work is concerned with competition as it applies to international affairs, sports culture, and national identity. Focusing on image-making processes and visual criticism, she uses drawing, photography, graphic design, animation, and writing to explore alternative modes of representation within news media. She is a 2022-2023 Fulbright Germany Research Scholar with previous experience working for magazine publications Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020 with a BFA in Visual Art.