“Thinking about the face and the body, I looked up the word mystery: “something unexplained, unknown, or kept secret.” A Jocelyn Lee photograph (“light reflects off an object and accumulates on a sensitized surface, marking it so as to resemble that object”) is true to the mysteries of our lives. There is a quality in what she brings before us which I’d call downright down-home mystical—“spiritually significant or symbolic”—though I could not say of what. What is this flesh, anyway?! Are we “spirits” “in” bodies? We are bodies—something unexplained, unknown, and kept secret. We are reminded here that our bodies are nothing to be proud of, or ashamed of. Sometimes they seem like chance companions, sometimes as inevitable as our parents. Jocelyn Lee welcomes us to contemplate the secrets hidden in plain sight.”
