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28/5/2010

Jack In the Space

Dean Project, New York

curated by Heng-Gil Han

DEAN PROJECT is thrilled to present the gallery’s annual invited curator exhibition. “Jack in the Space”, curated by Heng-Gil Han of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning.

Jack in the Space features the work of Hyong Nam Ahn, Lishan Chang, Kyung Woo Han, Janelle Iglesias, Eun Hyung Kim, and Hyungsub Shin.

“What happens if Jackson Pollock’s drips get unraveled? What happens if physical spaces exist between the paint layers? Pollack’s drip painting presents a singular surface of compressed time and material density. When that compression of space and time is physically unzipped, we would get layers of time-fragments spread out one after another in depth. Will this physical space appear confusing in total disarray filled with objects placed randomly here and there without a clear organizing principle? Or in contrary, will the space (or its atmosphere) feel organic, breathing, and growing—that is, biological in a word?

This exhibition collects the works by six artists who are concerned with constructing a corporeal space that activates bodily experience. They examine ways of making the illusory space of painting be felt rather than being seen. The exhibition is not a show that presents an optical space of disembodied gaze, but a ground offering a physical space that can be entered in the present terms of here and now. The exhibition engages in a critical dialogue with the traditional reading of an exhibition as a visual text. It attempts to explore the semiotic operation of that particular kind of text in relation to what it does to us and how we make use of it for a greater good.

The exhibition also debates on its semantic value. All physical reality is a mere appearance of something else that is truly real. There exists an idea behind the physical entertainments, and the viewer’s physical interaction with the work is a way of communicating the idea. The tangible physicality of the space gets intellectualized, digested, and symbolized; it is lifted off to mean something else that can be seen only by the eyes of the mind. The result is a somewhat contradictory space that is physical yet conceptual—a physical manifestation of disembodied thoughts and contemplation. Although what is communicated is not clear, the exhibition leaves the possibility of semantic interpretations of Pollock’s liberating action open instead of remaining dogmatic.”

Heng-Gil Han currently serves as the Visual Arts Director and Curator for Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, New York (JCAL). He is the Project Founder and Director of Jamaica Flux: Workspace and Windows, an ambitious, large-scale, perennial exhibition of site-specific projects investigating the potential of art to transform the built environment by revealing the economic, social, and institutional forces acting on it and prompting new ways of interacting with the space and the public.
In addition to Jamaica Flux: Workspace and Windows, Han has successfully presented a number of well-recognized exhibitions at JCAL, including Global Priority (2002), LivePictures: Digital World Animates Contemporary Art (2006), and Metro Poles (2008). He has also mounted exhibitions exploring issues of identity, gender, and cultural ideology/politics in the context of today’s hyper-mental and media-dominated environment. The exhibitions such Wangechi Mutu (2002), Serene Beauty: Intersections between Sublime and Zen (2003), and Reality/Fiction (2004), emphasize the awareness of cultural conditions through observation and critical analyses of transmitted and constructed reality.
Han recently served as a curator for the 2008 Busan Sculpture Project, Busan Biennale, South Korea, and is responsible for The 21st Century, The Feminine Century, The Century of Diversity and Hope featured at the 2009 International Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale, Incheon, South Korea. He recently has published Network and Fluid, a collection of his critical essays in Korea. Han just published a collection of his critical essays on contemporary art, Network and Fluid, in Korea.

Eun Hyung Kim’s work is expressionistic in style, wild and compulsive in touch, and spontaneous in action. As the artist precisely designates it in his statement, his “large-scale wall drawings” are not murals, but an installation of drawings that fully surrounds the viewer. Though the drawings are two-dimensional, and though they narrate stories of life for an eye trained to gaze the universe through a pictorial window, the installation does not elude into the realm of illusion, but immediately engage with the physical space and the physical body of the artist and the viewer. The drawings are made tangible, actual, and real. Kim Eun Hyung pursues to produce a three-dimensional painting in which the viewer is literally immersed as opposed to the traditional painting offering an imaginative surface or a pictorial space, in which the viewership is disembodied.
Eun Hyung Kim (b.1977, Korea) shares his creative time among New York, Chicago, and his hometown Seoul. Kim holds MFA degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008) and Seoul National University (2006). He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2007). He has participated in numerous shows internationally, including Paris, Helsinki, Cologne, Chicago, New York, Tokyo, and Seoul. He has had several solo exhibitions at Gaia Gallery in Seoul and Gallery X in Chicago. An upcoming solo show will be held next April at Gallery 400 in Chicago.
Kyung Woo Han’s body of work is analytic and deals with the conflicting relationship between optical and conceptual perceptions. The artist presents a solution of how a round square is possible (a cylinder!). he also courageously dares to challenge the reductionism’s idea that all forms in the universe can be reduced to a triangle, a square, and a circle. His geometric abstract sculpture implicitly supports the thesis that the source of conflicting ideas lies in the differences of points of view—“subjectivity” in another word. In the Tableau with Objects (2008), the artist translates the two-dimensional Modrainesque blocks of primary colors into a three-dimensional space as if one could walk into the geometric composition of Mondrian’s painting. In relation to the present exhibition, Han’s work is interesting for its skepticism of virtual reality and its playful game with the question of reality. Is the fake Mondrian on the screen, representing Mondrian in a manner of imitation, a surface, or is it an actual three-dimensional space?

Kyung Woo Han (b 1980, Korea) is a video artist who dismantles the conventions of his medium with deadpan, dead-on, unpretentious wit and humor. Using a strait and narrow perspective of the video camera, He makes virtual image out of geometric props stacked in real space. What at first seems the result of digital manipulation is revealed through a series of surprises to be a high order of visual gag in real space. He exploits the particularities of his medium with an eye that points out how fragile our optical universe is. Han holds an MFA in Film, Video and New Media, from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). He is an alumnus of the AIM program at the Bronx of the Arts. Bronx, NY (2008). Han received awards, fellowships and residencies, including the Visual Arts Award from the AHL Foundation, NY (2007), Asian Cultural Council from Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York (2006), and Artist in Residence at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2009). He will also attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture this summer. Han lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Hyungsub Shin has been searching for a form where nature and culture coincide. His abstract sculpture in the form of rhizome references the rhythm of life in continual flux, expansion by division and fragmentation, and identity as social relationship. Using the sheaves of electrical wires, jute rope, and plastic twines, Shin branches them repeatedly into smaller scale. The sculpture is composed of many nods of branches, emphasizing on the relationship not only between the various forms within the sculpture, but also between the sculpture and its environments. The characteristic of his work is the possibility of the unlimited expansion that it can grow through adding new elements to the existing structure. Another characteristic lies in the fractal unity of the sculpture and its parts; as the sculpture itself is composed of a group of spreading “branches,” the whole structure of the installation is not significantly affected by adding or subtracting its parts.
Hyungsub Shin (b. 1969, Korea) received his BFA from Hong-Ik University in Seoul and MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He presented his first one-person exhibition at the BODA Gallery 1996 in Seoul. Since then, he has actively shown his work in a number of one-person exhibitions and group shows in the US and his home country. He recently installed his site-specific works in public spaces, including Art Omi’s Fields Sculpture Park (2005), Socrates Sculpture Park (2005), and Incheon Womem Artists’ Biennale (2009). He lives and works in New York.

Lishan Chang’s project LC Bakery is a series of conceptual art installations including sculptures, installation, portrayed documentation, and artistic performance. The artist chars baguettes and hero bread loaves at the exhibition site as a kind of performance. The charred bread that the artist calls BLACKERY is then used as the basic element of his installation. It serves the functions of a brush stroke and a mark of color in his completed installation that produces an abstract and energetic image. Change’s installation reveals that the traditional components of painting such as drawing and coloring are not a state, but a perfomative action of placing, connecting, and arranging tiny marks of color. The artist perceives a painting not as a means of representation, but as a field for an action that nurtures and expands human liberty. LC Backery has been seen at various venues including the Queens Museum of Art in NY 2004, the Union Square North Park in NY 2004, the New Art Gallery in Connecticut 2006, the Washington Pavilion for Arts and Science in SD in 2008 and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan 2008‐09.
Lishan Chang (b. in Taiwan) participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Taipei Award 2008 Exhibition, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2009); Jamaica Flux, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, NY (2007); Float 2007, Socrates Sculpture Park, NY (2007) among others. His solo exhibitions include LC Bakery Washington Pavilion at Washington Pavilion of Arts & Science, Sioux Falls, SD (2008); One to Infinity at the Art Center of William Patterson University, NJ (2007); and Franconia Sculpture Park (2007). He received a number of awards such as The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2008); NYFA Fellowship (2008); and Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2007). He participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center, VA 92008); ISCP, NY (2007); and LMCC, NY (2006-7).

Hyong Nam Ahn’s painting explores the kinetic, ever changing nature of our environment, the exhilarating, dynamic movements surrounding humans as a being of the unrest creative mind. In his painting, the act of painting is not taken away from the life and the world; it is a way of continuing living—a life that that the artist bravely chose to live, to experience, and to explore. By painting, the artist wants to live out every day and every hour of his life. The act of making art is not a profession, nor a practice; doctors and lawyers practice, but not artists. They live. They live with and in their art. The incessant energy of an artist’s life exudes by free forms, intensive color, emotional sounds, and awakening lights. Most of Ahn’s recent works are based on the subliminal power for transformation inspired by natural occurrences such as moonlight and migrating birds. That particular power, released and unfolded in a physical space, forms a free action and existence by which art and life could ultimately be defined.
Hyong Nam Ahn (b. 1955, Korea) earned his MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1980. Informed by Kinetic Art in the 1960s, his sculpture integrates lights, sound, and movements. Ahn has received numerous commissions for a public sculpture from notable institutions or corporations such as McDonald Corporation in Kirkland, WA; The Mayor's Advisory Committee on Art & Culture, Baltimore, MD; and McCormick Place Donnelly Hall World Convention Center, Chicago, IL. He designed the Main Stadium Torch Tower for Seoul 88 Olympic Games. He presented a number of one-person exhibitions at prestigious museums including Ohio University Art Museum, Oxford, OH; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and Lawrence University, Appleton, WI.

Informed by the different cultural backgrounds of her parents, Janelle Iglesias’ art combines and fuses elements from Scandinavian folk traditions, modern design, and the rasquache of the Latin world—an approach that makes the most from the least. While Iglesias explores the dynamics and tension of organic/natural forms and natural phenomena, her art- making process is a defiant and inventive resourcefulness of means. She works in a variety of media, and her recent projects include large scale sculptural installations pieced together from materials found in the neighborhoods where they are built. Through collecting, arranging and manipulating the everyday Iglesias creates new micro-environments inspired by animal architecture and human contraptions. The artist sees her work as an extension of magical realism—combining what one might simultaneously perceive fantastic, ordinary, natural and domestic.
Janelle Iglesias uses everyday objects to create elaborately assembled mixed media installations, sculpture and video. She is interested in transforming materials that might be found on the side of the road, the seashore, the supermarket or your basement. Born and raised in Queens, NYC, she received a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Emory University, an MFA in Sculpture from VCU and was a recent participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Janelle often collaborates with her sister Lisa as Las Hermanas Iglesias, and in 2008-09, they were artists in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, through LMCC’s Paris Residency Program.

Image: Hyungsub Shin

Opening Reception: Saturday May 29th from 6-9pm

Dean Project
45-43 21st Street, Long Island City, NY 11101
Gallery hours: Thurs – Sun Noon – 6pm
free admission

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