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.

Press

Fad Magazine “The Armory Show Reveals 2026 Programme with Caribbean Focus, Performance & After Hours” by Mark Westall

The Art Newspaper “The Armory Show spotlights Caribbean artists and galleries” by Carlie Porterfield