Sea View is pleased to present a four-part installation by LA-based artist Zenobia Lee (b. 1996, New York, NY) for Platform at the Armory Show.

Lee’s installation examines how natural forms and material traditions register the history and afterlives of Caribbean colonialism. The banana leaves reference a photograph of Wifredo Lam standing beside a leaf. For Lee, the form appears “industrial yet lush,” staging a tension between the controlled and the organic. The natural world emerges as both an agent and adversary within the imperial project. Shaped by histories of extraction and exploitation, the banana leaf becomes what Lee calls “a locality of refusal,” a living form that colonial powers could neither master nor absorb.

The baskets draw on African and Caribbean weaving traditions and the knowledge production those practices carry into the present. Translated into steel, their weight underscores the historical implications of their form, connecting cultivated landscapes to the labor of gathering, transporting, and containing. Rebar evokes Caribbean vernacular architecture, particularly homes inhabited while in stages of construction, and figures the embodiment of living in a constant state of transformation. The baskets likewise are still in the process of being woven.

Lee’s shift from rusted steel to aluminum banana leaves, invokes the environmental and social devastation of bauxite mining in Jamaica, including deforestation, toxic pollution, agricultural disposession, and rural displacement. Aluminum thus locates colonial extraction within the postcolonial present, where the landscape remains vulnerable to renewed forms of extractive capitalism.

Zenobia Lee (b. 1996, New York, NY) is a Los Angeles based artist whose sculpture-based practice seeks for clarity and meaning residing within a particular object or material. Rooted in the enduring colonial histories of the Caribbean and its diaspora, her work traces the ways queerness, the homoerotic, and desire take shape—how they persist, shift, flatten. Drawing from personal narratives and symbolic archetypes, she considers what becomes of chaos when it reverberates and recycles across time. Sculpting is veiling, while veiling becomes sculpting. Clarity becomes more visible by its relation to other objects.

Zenobia received her MFA at the University of California Los Angeles (2025) after graduating with a BFA from Oberlin College in Ohio (2018). She is the co-founder of Sucking Salt—a collaborative research project focused on archiving Caribbean architecture and aesthetics. In addition to her solo exhibition at Sea View, Zenobia concurrently presented work at Frieze Los Angeles 2026. She has previously exhibited in a two-person show at Deli Gallery in New York (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Weeksville Heritage Center (2026); Chozick Family Art Gallery in New York (2025); Culver Center of the Arts in Riverside, CA (2024); Rachel Uffner in New York (2022); and HOUSING in New York (2020). Lee is in the public collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Bunker Art Space, West Palm Beach, FL; and the North Carolina State Historic Sites and Properties, Raleigh, NC. Lee has a forthcoming solo exhibition in 2027 at Pedro Cera, Lisbon, PT. In 2028, Lee will have a solo exhibition at the Rockefeller Center, New York, NY, with Art Production Fund.