Stacey Lee Gee: ROTATOR
@ Ignition project space
3839 W. Grand Ave, Chicago, IL 60651
Opening Friday, May 1st, from 6PM - 9PM
On view through Monday, May 25th
Stacey Lee Gee
ROTATOR
May 1 – 25, 2026
This is a meditation on palindromes as philosophy. I am using the word rotator as a lens for thinking about time, presence, and the texture of lived experience. The opening establishes the literal: a rotator turns without arriving. Then it makes the key statement; the word rotator doesn’t just describe rotation, it enacts it. You read it forward and arrive back where you started. Form and meaning are the same thing.
That line — a rotator is only stable when it’s moving; stillness breaks it — is a pivot. It inverts the usual assumption that stability means rest. For a gyroscope, a bicycle wheel, a spinning top, this is literally true. Motion is the equilibrium. Stop it and it falls.
The second half turns inward. It’s about what it feels like to be inside a life you once only imagined. And here the rotator becomes a metaphor for presence itself:
You planned for something, and then arrived inside it
But being inside it is nothing like the imagining
It has unexpected weight, texture, synchronicity that no plan could include. You have to circle a new room before it becomes yours
Stacey Lee Gee was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Chicago. She exhibits both nationally and internationally including at the the Lubeznik Center, Chicago Cultural Center, Ignition Project Space, Ceres Gallery, Terrain Biennial, and Centro d’Art e Cultura. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Iowa and is the current president of the historic feminist gallery ARC in Chicago.
Stacey’s work is an extension of the energy that leaks from her fingertips, a reconfiguration of objects past their appropriate era. Her art reorders the past in order to prepare for the future. She believes art is a service meant to perpetuate the healthy psyche of society.
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Tags: Humboldt Park, Ignition project space, ROTATOR, Stacey Lee Gee
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