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Nayeob Kim and Susan Kang
The Unwritten History of a Quixote
Saturday, June 7 to Saturday, June 28, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 8pm
Allow me modestly to claim that I am much better now at ambiguities.
– Saul Bellow in Herzog
The Unwritten History of a Quixote features Nayeob Kim and Susan Kang,
two artists who approach their work through play that is repetitive,
laborious, idealistic and absurd. The idea of the yard sale
metaphorically connects Kim and Kang’s process-based practices.
At a yard sale, private objects are publicly displayed—objects
that often carry a history replete with personal memories. Such
objects, so dependant on the hands they fall in, fluctuate in status as
containers of cultural myths and are infused with narratives that hold
the imagination.
Arnold Schoenberg, a major figure in atonal music, developed the
twelve-tone technique in which no single note or tonality was given the
hierarchical dimensions emphasized in classical western harmony. To aid
with the systematic use of all twelve tones, he devised mathematic
devices. What intrigues Nayeob Kim about his devices is how they seem
mathematically inaccurate, where sounds that seem unfixed and erratic
are in actuality carefully considered and ordered. Kim’s project,
“Remoter than Egypt,” consists of a series of modest sized
oil paintings on board. In an attempt to collapse the ordinary and the
extraordinary through democratic reconstructions of a playground
(brimming with positivist idealism), she creates archeological shapes
that evoke the architecture of Egypt’s glory days.
During the last ten minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s
L’Eclisse, a montage of tethered everyday structures stream
silently before our eyes: dilapidated modernist buildings, cross-walk,
pavement, the action of the wind to the trees, a street lamp and the
crescent moon. Throughout L’Eclisse these structures, slowly
inching their way to the foreground, come to speak louder than the
distraught romantic couple of the film (reticent lovers’ who
express their malaise in listless meanderings through empty rooms,
parks and industrial piazzas). With a subtle nod to Michelangelo
Antonioni’s film, Susan Kang's installation evokes the
filmmaker's sense of silence and shrewd attention to architectural
space. The quietude of her work derives from her choice of materials:
over-looked common place technologies such as saran-wrap or pencils. In
The Unwritten History of a Quixote, Kang has built a bed of staples on
the floor in the shape an eclipse.
--Tiziana La Melia
NAYEOB KIM is a recent
graduate of Emily Carr University. Born in South Korea, she moved to
California and now lives in Vancouver. Focusing mostly in painting,
Nayeob explores the ordinary and personal within the limited space
between now/then, order/chaos, etc. Through jokes, nonsense, comedy and
tragedy - the ordinary - in its subliminal mind, develops its own
sensitive, intricate system.
SUSAN KANG is a
Korean–Canadian interdisciplinary artist who graduated from Emily
Carr University in 2008. She works in painting, drawing, sculpture and
installation. Contrary to many suspicions, Susan Kang does not have an
OCD. But none of the above knowledge is of any importance.
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