Untitled (A Spotted Tree)
2025
Giclee Print on Hanemühle photorag
40 x 30cm
A single tree stands on a hilltop, almost entirely obscured by a solid blue circle. The colour is recognisable: the chroma key blue used throughout broadcast and film production to mark a surface for removal, awaiting whatever image will replace it. Here, nothing replaces it. The disc remains, opaque and unmoving, and the tree stays hidden behind it.
Elsewhere in Off-line Images, the chroma surface is a threshold, a place where one image gives way to another, where what is erased is also what becomes visible. Untitled (A Spotted Tree) withholds that exchange. The blue does not vanish into a second layer of meaning. It simply blocks. What should be a transition becomes a refusal, an image that announces an absence and then declines to fill it.
This sits inside the wider proposition that runs through Lee's practice: that an image which resolves too quickly into a single, legible picture has already given up something true to the conditions under which it was made. Photography promises to record what stands before the camera. Here the camera records a tree and a viewer is shown its blotting out instead, a visible decision rather than a hidden one. The landscape continues around the circle in greyscale, undisturbed, as if nothing has been removed. Only the blue insists otherwise.