calendario eventi  :: 

X

8/3/2002

When We Were Kings

Galerie Wieland, Berlin

galerie wieland is pleased to announce Helen Cho's solo show ''When We Were Kings''. Cho will present an installation of soap objects and a series of photographs of carved soap pieces in snow.

Strange and wondrous things often lie hidden in plain sight. Not long ago, Helen Cho had a quiet epiphany regarding soap, specifically those scented cleansing bars to which we give barely a passing thought, but with which we share an unusual tactile intimacy. Cho soon began experimenting with soap as an artistic medium whose mutability is as intrinsic to its nature as is its hygienic utility. Undeniably sensuous and personal soft, slippery and pleasing soap begins its short life as a generic consumer product, but ends it as a well-worn, uncannily human relic.
Cho recognizes this curious and neglected beauty, taking obvious delight in stripping a common domestic material of its functionality while enhancing its inherently expressive and anthropomorphic peculiarities. She makes her "useless" objects with ordinary kitchen utensils in a process more similar to food preparation chopping, grating, washing than to conventional sculpting. The highly-polished forms, sporting the readymade soapy colors Cho favors (fleshy pinks, creamy ambers), are freed by their purposelessness to explore a multitude of latent associations. They suggest everything from the corporeal fanciful internal organs, glossy bodily orifices and protuberances, lustrous mutated limbs to the exotically zoological odd tropical fruits or metamorphosing sci-fi insects. The effect of her clustered objects is analogous to the astonishment one might experience while floating face down, eyes wide open, in some equatorial lagoon, gazing rapturously at the sea cucumbers, urchins, and corrals of a fantastical realm. Inversely, the deep snows of the Canadian north have special significance for Cho: Blankets of temporary purity giving a magical grace to the quotidian grimness of what lies hidden beneath. For this reason, she often photographs her soap pieces in this neutral environment, carefully arranging scenes and situations that suggest the fragile incongruity of extraterrestrial flora and fauna emerging from the frozen Arctic wastes. Soap like the snowdrifts in which Cho nestles it is an ephemeral, delicate substance living on borrowed time. It too will dissolve, slither away, and disappear. Its materiality may be fleeting, but the innocently seductive qualities that Cho summons from it remain.
(James Trainor)
With support from the Canadian Embassy

opening reception: Friday, March 8, 2002, 7pm
exhibition duration: March 9 - April 20, 2002
gallery hours: Wed-Fr 2-7pm, Sat 12-5pm
open weekend: Fri/Sat March 8/9 til 11pm
mi-fr 14-19, sa 12-17 uhr

Galerie Wieland
ackerstr. 5
10115 berlin
fon: +49-30-28 38 57 51
fax: +49-30-28 38 57 52

stampa

permanent link