Lee Henderson is a contemporary artist whose practice includes video, photography, installation, sculpture, performance, and text. His work moves in constant contemplation of death, in senses grand and minute, somewhere between the persistence of collective histories and the brevity of individual lives.
Lee studied art in Canada and Germany, holding a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2003) and an MFA from the University of Regina (2005). He currently teaches art and media in Toronto at Toronto Met and OCAD Universities.
Recent projects and commissions include Fixing a Novel by Removing all the Adjectives, a single, mirror-polished brick in a cellar somewhere under Friedrichshain (Kunstraum Tapir, Berlin, 2014); The Known Effects of Lightning on the Body, an installed video projection of burning matches that “bow” as they exhaust themselves (YYZ, Toronto, 2014; The Rooms, St. John’s, 2015; Nuit Blanche Edmonton, 2015); and Palliative Care (1985-1992), a video installation featuring a supercut of every reference to death found in TV’s “The Golden Girls” (Latitude53, Edmonton, 2016). Henderson was the recipient of the CONTACT 2016 Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso Prize for Never Letting Us Take Breath, an automated slide-lecture and installation of photographic prints offering a meditation on the photo-archive and human mortality.
Notable recent exhibition venues include The Phillips Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Magenta Festival Boston, The Zero Film Festival (USA); The Dunlop Art Gallery, Mendel Art Gallery, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, and Zalucky Contemporary (Canada); Samaband Islenskra Myndlistarmanna, Reykjavik (Iceland). His work can be found in private and public collections including the Mendel Art Gallery/Remai Modern, the University of Regina President’s Collection, and The Center for Fine Art Photography USA.
He is represented by Zalucky Contemporary, in Toronto.
