Take an audio tour of a 2022-23 exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum! Listen to artist Lee Boot chat about his show "Lee Boot: Abstracts & Artifacts," on view at The Peale from November 2022-January 2023. You can see videos and interact with more media files using Smartify, the ultimate cultural travel app! Includes 21 narrated stops.

Lee Boot (00:00): This painting, this large four by seven foot painting is the same size as the last two big paintings you saw, but it's not part of the same project. This is part of another project called the SEEe Project. SEEe is an acronym that stands for systems Exploration and Engagement Environment. And this project is about seeing our world the way it truly is. Now, if you look at this painting, you are not thinking this is the world the way it truly looks to me. Um, no, certainly it is not. Let me explain. When I say seeing the world the way it really is, what I mean is if you take any kind of issue, climate change, how to have a successful city inequality, health, whatever, all of these issues are. They, they emerge from the intersections of multiple systems. They emerge from a very complex landscape of factors.

(01:13): You know, the reason one person might succeed in their education and another person might not is a very complicated story. It has to do with their school. It has to do with their economic status. It has to do with the educational traditions in the culture that they identify with. It has to do with potentially neurological capacities of various kinds. You know, it has to do with emotional challenges. Anyway, the list goes on and on. The truth is, almost all of the issues that are really critical and hard to solve for us right now as a society are the ones that emerge as properties of the collisions of these complex systems. Because the other kinds of problems, even putting a man on the moon are comparatively simple. And we have learned to solve them through very, you know, reductive narrow means of really isolating the problem and and solving it in a very reasoned way.

(02:20): These kinds of challenges we face now are the ones that didn't respond very well to that way of working. And consequently, these are the problems we're left with. I mean, how else could it be? But the good news is this, the painting that you're looking at is not a painting of a problem per se. It was a way for me to kind of imagine these complex worlds by trying to depict the history of vocal music that a, a soprano a, a well known soprano Tony Arnold Antoinette Arnold wanted to use to teach her students. Again, a very complex thing.

(02:59): Where does the music of our world come from? What are the what? How can we represent it and visualize it? So this is kind of like a visualization of music history. That's really all you need to know to look at this. We could get into the specifics, but it's more important to say, Hmm, you know, if I'm looking at something as complex as music and where it comes from and so on, it might require this kind of rich, complex environment to start to depict what it comes from. I should also mention about the Sea Project, that again, if you follow the yarn, you're gonna end up at a monitor in the, in the center of the room that has several films of all the different kinds of visualizations and software that we've been developing to try to get at this idea of visualizing complexity in a 3D environment.

(03:51): There's been a lot of different iterations of this. We started out by writing our own software. Uh, we then switched to using a game engine. We've done animations and just sort of conceptual pieces to try to illustrate where we'd be going.

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