Jaye Rhee’s Fragile Terrain Is a Pixelated Dreamscape With a Dose of Existential Dread
Editor review
Walk into Locust Projects right now, and you’ll find yourself drowning—not in water, but in pixels. Jaye Rhee has conjured a paper-cut hallucination of Miami’s oceanfront, a swirling mass of 700 pixelated cubes and 200 rounded objects; each meticulously handcrafted from recycled, custom-printed paper. This process of handcrafting each element, from the initial design to the final placement, is a testament to Rhee’s dedication and artistic skill. It is a landscape that is not a landscape, a place that exists nowhere except in memory, screens, data, and the flickering remnants of our over-digitized lives.
But here’s the allure: It is breathtakingly beautiful. Fragile Terrain is seductive and artificial, a film set masquerading as nature, a virtual world that crinkles under your breath. It’s a mirage built on paper and nostalgia, and like all mirages, it makes you question what is real. Where does nature end and technology begin? Are we experiencing the world or just its representation?
Rhee—trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and now based in New York—doesn’t just make art; she hijacks your senses. This isn’t some polite, decorative thing. Her work is sly, calculated, and loaded with existential contradictions. These contradictions, such as the juxtaposition of the natural and the digital, the beautiful and the artificial, are at the heart of her work. It’s landscape painting for the algorithmic age, a callback to the 19th-century Romantics who longed for untouched nature, only this time; the longing is filtered through pixels, data points, and mass production.
It is also impossible to overlook the ominous undertone running through this show. This fragile, handcrafted illusion of paradise is built from waste—a stark reminder that even our idyllic visions are shaped by consumption and excess. The tech that allows us to replicate nature is aiding in its destruction. That is the gut punch here: Fragile Terrain is both a love letter and a warning sign, a call to action.
And yet—god, it is gorgeous. The whole thing shimmers like a broken screen, a heat mirage, a glitch in the system. Stand there long enough, and you’ll start to feel the pull of it, the weight of all those hand-folded, perfectly imperfect pixels, each one whispering: Is this real? Does it even matter? This contemplation is part of the experience Rhee invites you to have with her work. What are your thoughts? How does it make you feel?
Jaye Rhee has built something that floats between worlds, where nature is a ghost, the digital is physical, and everything—absolutely everything—is fragile. You should see it before it disappears.
Final Verdict: A poetic mind-bender of an exhibition. It will make you question everything and look damn good doing it.
