ALEXANDER LEE

THE DEPARTURE OF THE FISH: REDUX

2007

THE DEPARTURE OF THE FISH is a trilogy of dioramic sculptural installations around a creation myth that tells of the formation of the island of Tahiti (French Polynesia). The story relates the migration of a group of disfranchised from the island of Havai’i (currently Raiatea); their transformation into a fish and subsequently into a volcanic island: Tahiti-manahune.

The trilogy started in 2006 as a pilot in the artist’s own studio, and was further developed in an exhibition in Los Angeles, then New York. Referencing Director Trent Harris’ film, The Beaver Trilogy, where each short film in the trilogy is a fictionalized re-enactment of Harris’ raw footage encounter with “The Beaver Kid,” Lee intended the re-iteration of THE DEPARTURE OF THE FISH as a commentary on narrative sculpture and dioramas as storytelling devices. Each re-fabrication and installation of the work (bigger in scale and each time with more developped forms) marks a progression in the self embedded mystification of the project. The title of the final version, THE DEPARTURE OF THE FISH REDUX, a pun on Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now Redux, culminated the narrative structure and tone of the work. The artist’s home island creation myth, born of civil warfare and ecologiocal catastrophe becomes a gloomy morality tale of death and rebirth for his adopted island home, New York City, in the aftermath of 9-11 and on the brink of the 2008 financial crisis.