Marta Lee’s Altars: Pattern, Synchronicity, and Sacred Time
Wells Chandler October 22. 2025
Installation view of 11:11 at Tappeto Volante Brooklyn, NY
In Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars, queer folklorist Kay Turner proposes that altars are relational assemblages: sites where women arrange objects of memory, desire, grief, and celebration into visual matrices. Beyond ritual objects or religious furnishings, Turner emphasizes that altars blur the boundary between the sacred and the everyday. A pressed flower, a family photo, a toy, or a scrap of fabric might carry as much devotional weight as a saint’s icon or relic. What defines the altar is not the sanctity of its contents but the act of arrangement itself. The ritual placing of things produces a charged space housing presence and practice.
Marta Lee, “Old and New Order (Diary)” (2024) acrylic, pastel, crayon, & oil on linen 47 × 35 inches
From this perspective, Marta Lee’s paintings may be read as altars in themselves. Her canvases cull heirlooms, quotidian objects, textiles, and mementos into carefully composed yet intuitively open constellations. Just as Turner proposes, Lee’s paintings collapse distinctions between the mundane and the precious, the secular and the sacred. An Easter egg, a childhood hacky sack, or a record player coexist with family textiles and cherished albums, each transformed into pattern and color, each granted equal being.
Marta Lee “Rainbow (Around Her Neck)” (2024) acrylic, crayon, & graphite on linen over canvas 58 × 54 inches
In Lee’s paintings, flattening is not only formal but metaphysical. It is a way of transforming objects into a unified field. Lee’s commitment to flattening can be understood as an insistence on presence. On a microcosmic level, this mirrors the structure of reality itself. We are atoms and energy, illusionistically contained in separate forms defined by stories, relations, and perception, yet ultimately part of one continuous field.
Marta Lee “What I Want (to Paint)” (2025) acrylic, crayon, & flashe on panel 54 × 38 inches
Atomically we are all made of the same stuff. This truth is reflected structurally in Lee’s work; the objects composing her still lifes exist on the same visual plane. By refusing volumetric illusion, she forces the viewer into direct encounter with what is. Opening oneself to the ordinary becomes a vehicle for awareness —a contemplative practice anchored in the everyday. This resonates with the praxis of painters such as Lois Dodd, Josephine Halvorson, and Catherine Murphy, who all privilege the overlooked stuff of daily life, painting what is immediately before them in a straightforward way. Lee’s sensitivity to the intimate drama of ordinary objects links her to Horace Pippin and Dawn Clements, who both turned sustained observation into a devotional act —transmuting the commonplace into a record of presence and feeling. In Lee’s work, presence is achieved through the full immersion into the surface of things, the quiet insistence of the here-and-now as a meaningful encounter.
Marta Lee “I practiced the color names while she played solitaire (Day and Night)” (2024) acrylic, crayon, pastel, & oil on canvas 48 × 60 inches
Lee’s paintings can be framed as nowness time-capsules. Each canvas compresses and collapses multiple temporalities —childhood toys, heirlooms passed down through generations, seasonal decorations, and contemporary objects coexist creating a ritual center, where time is not linear but synchronic, woven together through pattern. As with altars, Lee’s paintings create an axis mundi —a site where disparate timelines meet, where the circadian is sanctified through visual ordering, and where memory becomes present. Linear time collapses in, I practiced the color names while she played solitaire (Day and Night). Past, present, and future exist concurrently. A view out the left window depicts day, while the view out the right reveals that it is also night.
Marta Lee “Prospect Park Kunstkabinett” (2025) acrylic & crayon on linen 60 × 48 inches
Carl Jung defined synchronicity as the occurrence of two or more events that are significantly connected without a causal relationship. Acausal connecting principles reveal the psyche’s participation in a larger web of meaning. In Lee’s work, synchronicity emerges through the visual logic of pattern recognition. By flattening objects into ornamental lattices and idiosyncratic shapes, Lee draws out archetypal echoes —a record becomes a spiral, its hypnotic form guides us inward and outward. Baby blankets become soft ordering grids. A clown becomes a guardian. The flower’s petals on an album-cover rhyme with a fragment of foil. The syntax of these relationships invite viewers to perceive connections across objects, histories, and emotional registers that would otherwise remain invisible. The repetition of certain motifs across her work —the reappearance of hacky sacks, family textiles, or music —becomes a kind of visual synchronicity. The same objects resurface in new contexts, anchoring the viewer and charging the talismans through relational layering —transforming them into ritual tools.
Marta Lee “Someone More Thoughtful (Here Goes Everything)” (2021) acrylic, crayon, & flashe on linen 34 × 40 inches
Pareidolia, the human tendency to perceive faces or meaningful forms in random or ambiguous patterns, offers a useful lens for understanding Lee’s subtle incorporation of figuration. Lee distills psyche in her still lifes. Dangling red and blue ties form parallel suspended smiley faces in Prospect Park Kunstkabinett. Chinese White gouache signifying the mixed race of the artist, hovers above a grinning chocolate chip cookie in Someone More Thoughtful (Here Goes Everything). The hermetically sealed tube of paint is the bridge to an electric keyboard nestled in an undulating border of brown and black op art checkers floating on a sea of electrifying blue flashe. Anthropomorphic hints appear in an embedded egg nestled in a cozy mug anchoring the viewer in moments of gentle humor or playful recognition. Identity dissolves into a fruit salad collective in Mixed. In Lee’s work, each object—whether animate, inanimate, or partially anthropomorphized —functions both as a container of individual experience and as a reflection of awareness itself, melting across forms and patterns, pointing to a seamless continuity uniting apparent separations through drops —the form and substance of paint.
Marta Lee “Mixed” (2025) acrylic on linen 7 × 5 inches
In Lee’s paintings, the act of recognizing pattern becomes a reflexive gesture—awareness recognizing itself reflected through form. When objects are flattened into motifs and repeated across the canvas, they cease to be fixed representations and instead reveal the foundational structures that connect them. The act of perceiving these patterns becomes a kind of feedback loop, where looking discloses the way perception organizes itself. In this sense, the paintings operate less as depictions of things and more as reflections of the mind’s own ordering principle—anchors that hold together memory, intimacy, and time within a unified field.
Marta Lee “A Very Dear Christmas” (2025) acrylic & crayon on linen 20 × 24 inches
The title of Lee’s exhibition, 11:11, underscores these themes. In contemporary spiritual and popular culture, 11:11 is often understood as an angel number —a moment of heightened alignment in which inner and outer worlds briefly mirror each other. To notice 11:11 on a clock, is to experience a synchronicity that signals guidance or an opening between realms. Lee’s still lifes are moments where seemingly disparate objects and timelines align. Her intimate paintings are homages to the phenomena of connection, the tender moments that point to a veiled structure of reality, and the miracle of our existence that tethers us to ourselves and each other.
Installation view of 11:11 at Tappeto Volante Brooklyn, NY
Marta Lee: 11:11 at Tappeto Volante (126 13th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215) through November 2.