Locust Projects proudly presents It Might Be an Apple Far from the Tree, a new multimedia exhibition by internationally renowned artist Jaye Rhee. Opening on February 13, 2025, the exhibition transforms Locust Projects’ Main Gallery into an uncanny landscape of artificial environments constructed entirely from paper. These fragile and meticulously crafted settings mimic film sets, inviting viewers to question the nature of reality and its digital representations. By blurring the boundary between the physical and virtual, Rhee’s work challenges our perceptions of space, community, and memory in the digital age.

In It Might Be an Apple Far from the Tree, Rhee explores the complex emotional bonds humans form with digital entities, likening these connections to ancestral relationships with nature. Visitors are drawn into a dialogue about shared digital memories and the increasingly fluid movement between digital and physical spaces. The exhibition raises timely questions about how technology shapes our identities and sense of belonging while deconstructing the ways in which we perceive and interact with the environments around us.

The exhibition prominently features artificial landscapes made from layers of cut and folded paper. These fragile creations serve as backdrops to human figures, whose interactions within these fabricated environments evoke the aesthetics of cinema while raising questions about authenticity and connection. Throughout the gallery, Rhee contrasts hand-crafted paper landscapes with digitally mediated environments, inviting viewers to consider how these two realms overlap, intersect, and diverge, and how communities emerge from both.

It Might Be an Apple Far from the Tree is supported by the Knight Foundation’s Digital Commissions initiative, which fosters artistic exploration at the intersection of art and technology. Additional funding is provided by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Korea, Korea Arts Management Service, and the Fund for Korean Art Abroad.

About the Artist

Jaye Rhee (b. 1973, Seoul, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans video, photography, and performance. She is known for exploring the intersections of real and constructed environments, focusing on how identity, memory, and perception are mediated through visual culture. Rhee’s practice reflects an ongoing investigation into the ways we navigate both physical and virtual spaces. She earned her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her training laid the foundation for her immersive and conceptually layered works.

Rhee’s work has been exhibited widely at major international institutions, including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Queens Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Seoul Museum of Modern Art (SeMA), and La Triennale di Milano. In addition to her exhibitions, Rhee has participated in notable artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program. Rhee has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Doosan Yonkang Art Award, Franklin Furnace Fund, and the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) Young Artist Grant. She continues to create works that invite audiences to reconsider how technology, culture, and memory intersect in the contemporary world. She lives and works in New York.