it is, all greek to me. | Lee Goreas | Project Space

June 23rd - August 20th, 2016

it is, all greek to me., custom embossed golf balls, punchbowl, 2016.

LEE GOREAS: it is, all greek to me.

My preoccupation with golf culture started with a chance encounter with a sand trap that I fell into while playing golf with my sister and father. While climbing out of the trap I stopped thinking about the game and started looking at the landscape around me. I quickly became conscious of the composition of the physical shapes and forms of the golf course as manufactured landscape and entranced by the some-what sublime formal qualities of the Sports Garden. Specifically the design and layout of fairways and the placement of sand traps, trees, grasses, flowers, water-hazards, tee boxes and putting greens. In these landscapes I saw formal similarities between the composition, shapes and forms of Renaissance Gardens and Modernist Artists and Architects/Designers such as Eero Saarinen, Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Calder and Hans Arp. The event of falling into the sand trap marked the beginning of my research into and my obsession with, mixing golf culture with art history.

The work that I have produced specifically for this exhibition that coincides with the 2016 Saskatchewan Summer Games is an artist multiple and it has its roots in conceptual and postmodern practice. It is indebted to and influenced by the works of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, and Ed Ruscha. The post conceptual nature of this work lies in its performative and viewer interactive nature. It is my intention that the audience will take one of these multiples away with them, use it, and even lose it in a landscape.

The text on the ball “it is, all greek to me.” is an idiom. It deals with the general concept of something not being understandable. This could be a subject, object, event, another cultures history, language, art works, recent global economic events or why anyone would want to play the game of golf.

Within golf culture like many sports sub-cultures customizing the paraphernalia used in the rituals and activities with text is common practice. This allows practitioners to personally identify with their tools, participation and place within the larger culture. Sometimes groups, organizations or corporations will customize an object like a golf ball with a logo or text or a combination of both and use it to commemorate a particular event or as a new delivery system for their brand.

My artist multiple attempts to humorously and critically engage with these conventional uses and associations, and subvert them.

-Artist’s Statement

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Lee was born and raised in Kelowna, BC. He lives, teaches and maintains a studio practice in Toronto, ON. Lee lectures in The Department of Arts, Culture and Media at The University of Toronto Scarborough Campus where he teaches Drawing, Sculpture, Text Based Art and Foundations. Lee is a multidisciplinary installation-based artist. His installations are constructed out of video works, drawings, wall drawings, sculptures, photographs and text-works. Over the past twenty years Lee has received several arts grants from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and the British Columbia Arts Council. His work has been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally.

Lee is currently preparing for a solo exhibition of new digital photographic works that will be presented at Birch Contemporary between 2016-2017.