Perpetual Flux
As published in Gyeonggi Culture Naru, bimonthly art and culture magazine, 01-02, 2015.
As a perpetual foreigner (I’ve lived 11 years outside the United States) I suppose I am always ‘Living and Working in Flux’, as this exhibition is titled. I spent three months in Korea, enough time to develop and produce a new body of work, but not nearly enough time to understand the subtleties of what was going on around me.
For my time in residence, I investigated dimensions, specifically the relationship between one, two, three, and four dimensions. I flattened three-dimensional spaces and objects through photography, then resurrected the lost third dimension by cutting and layering. I also created work that allows you to see three actual dimensions, using reflections to show multiple views of a single object.
This work has seemingly little to do with Korea, as I wished to work with out the constraints of responding to a place and people I hadn’t properly met. But here I can also contradict myself. While my work does not respond to the history, politics, or contemporary issues of Korea, this work is site-specific in another way. It was devised, developed, and produced on Daebu Island. If I had been researching geometry and relativity in a different location, I would have understood it differently. The building blocks of this project are materials I discovered here – from the hardware shop on the island, art shops in Hongik, and Dongaemun hardware district. The ideas themselves were formed while surrounded by the inhabitants of the island – farmers, fishermen, weekend holidaymakers, and my fellow residents at the Gyeonggi Creation Center. I am happy to present my work here and will continue for some time working with the dimensions I discovered on Daebu Island.
As published in Gyeonggi Culture Naru, bimonthly art and culture magazine, 01-02, 2015.
I was invited to write an article about my experience as an artist-in-resident at the Gyeonggi Creation Center, and our concluding exhibition, 'Living and working in Flux'.