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Today is Cracki’s Birthday. All of Cracki’s friends are coming and the room is full of cakes and presents. Cracki’s been dreaming of a big party for months, and we’re gonna blow it out for her, candles and all. Cracki has given us so many special gifts, we want to do the same for her.
Maggie Lee is expert at finding things you know you saw somewhere but you didn’t. Her combinations of memories, dreams and narrative imagination are self-contained, her materials chosen for maximum potential to become chimeras. Maggie uses things that are recognizable but puts them together in ways that aren’t. It barely makes sense. Of course if you put gift wrap and ribbon around a canvas that makes it a present. Put candles on it and it’s a cake.
But the most affecting element of Maggie Lee’s work is its emotional essentiality. It feels like we know Cracki, like Cracki’s birthday is everyone’s birthday, like Maggie somehow saw everything backwards in the mirror and snapped it all into place. Knowing she’s there making everyone’s memories into her own dreams.
And there’s such comfort in that.