The Brooklyn Rail

A short trek into Storm King Art Center brings you to an unassuming installation of rocks lying low in the natural grass, mostly obscured from visibility until you climb the shallow hill on which they sit. Constellated into five groups, they suggest some kind of arcane or even abstract logic, as if they are shrunken megaliths or remnants of ancient celestial maps. Titled between the falling leaf and the surface of rock (2025), the work relies on information we’re unlikely to ascertain without reading an explanatory sign nearby: first, that the mostly-flat boulders are sourced from Storm King’s own landscape, and second, that their velvety indigo color results from use of the cyanotype photographic process, whereby a light-sensitive solution coating the rocks turned them blue with exposure to sunlight. Through the blue surface layer, the artist, Dionne Lee, has sparingly incised spirals, stick trees, tufts of grass, or tracings of the rock’s natural edges.

Recognizing that the rocks are actually photographs is important, because it situates the work alongside the long-held assumption that photography is a medium of truth due to its indexicality—in other words, that the light rays that recorded an image on the photographic plate reflected off a real object somewhere “out there” in front of the camera. Yet, for between the falling leaf and the surface of rock, the light exposure was so long (a whole day) that no image is left behind on the substrate for us to “read,” save for the imagery which Lee hand-incised through the blue layer after washing the works with vinegar to neutralize the photosensitivity of the rocks. The boulders’ lengthy exposure period does double work: it enmeshes the artwork with the specificity of its site (a certain amount of sun at a certain location on a certain day) and disallows the artist from imposing her own subjective standards onto the image—what Susan Sontag called “deciding how a picture should look.” Lee thus walks back some of the authorial strictures associated with composing a photograph in a gesture that seems calibrated to remind us that all the information we receive, especially when framed as unquestionable truth, is structured by power, and often by the power of omission.

Laid out in groupings configured like a rough circle in the landscape, between the falling leaf and the surface of rock compels viewers to ambulate in a similar pattern, from one constellation to the next. Rough themes emerge in each grouping: in the second (moving counterclockwise), Lee traced the edges of the rock as if coming to know nature’s contours; in the third, markings on the boulders seemingly correlate to the four cardinal directions; in the fourth, the artist made minimal interventions. Iconographically then, Lee’s imagery aligns more closely with ancient petroglyphs that translated the wonder of the natural world than, say, with capitalist or industrial worldviews wherein photographing the landscape presented nature as unadulterated and ripe for possession or extraction, particularly as explorers moved westward across the United States in the nineteenth century. At the exhibition’s close in November, the boulders will return to various locations across the sculpture park and thereby avoid accruing any monetary or exchange value. Lee has spoken about growing up across from Central Park but not learning about the Lenape people and the Black community of Seneca Village until she was an adult. At Storm King, Lee’s choice to work with site-specific materials and abjure landscape photography’s colonialist past posits her photo-sculptures as a conceptual project that critiques methodologies of interpretation, even if the artist does not, in this case, fully mine the history of Storm King’s particular site.