NDD IMMERSION ROOM

Ray Lee's latest installation, NDD Immersion Room, is named for “Nature Deficit Disorder,” a phrase coined by the writer Richard Louv to describe the rapidly decreasing amount of time human beings—children especially—spend outdoors. For many, time spent in front of screens has supplanted time spent in nature, introducing new iterations of alienation, anxiety, obsession, and boredom into a contemporary life mediated by digital technology.

To enter the Immersion Room, visitors must first secure their phones and electronic devices in a lockbox. Once inside, they are encouraged to immerse themselves in Lee’s encapsulation of a forest at night: fragrant pine trees, chirping crickets, autumn leaves underfoot, the damp flicker of a campfire in a clearing. In the absence of personal devices—which at any given moment connect us with millions of other people via the internet—visitors sit with their solitude, and must find new, unmediated ways of relating to themselves and their surroundings.

(Ray Lee Project Vol. 1) NDD Immersion Room is on view at Leila Heller Gallery in New York City from Saturday, February 24, 2018 to Wednesday, April 11, 2018. For more information, visit the gallery's website.

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Ray Lee, a New York-based artist, was born in West Virginia and raised in Houston, Texas. His multidisciplinary practice explores contemporary society’s aversion to nature, as well as its addiction to and obsession with modern technologies and media. Incorporating photography, video, sculpture, painting, and installation into immersive environments, Lee challenges viewers to question their entrenched and perfunctory investments in digital technology. Both universal and autobiographical in scope, his work explores how we “consume” nature and technology, as well as the new means by which we engage with ourselves, each other, and nature in a world increasingly split between “unplugged” and “plugged-in” ways of being.