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PAST
EXHIBITIONS
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Jinsoo Kim
Entering/Exiting
Februrary 9 - March 8, 2005
Artificial intelligence,
digital technology, and genetic engineering have already altered our
perception of the natural world. Artists today are exploring the possibilities
of re-ordering or re-inventing reality while accepting its simulacra
as a natural consequence. Jinsoo Kim's installations investigate realities
of all sorts while challenging traditional assumptions about the space,
the world, and its contents. Kim creates alternative often-improved
worlds in his constructions that sometimes result in fictional images,
which nevertheless appear plausible. Kim's apertures for example, which
seem like shutter panels are partially open but can also be understood
as being on the verge of closing.
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Entering/Exiting,
I, 2005, 32 Piece Painting. 11 x 11" |
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Entering/Exiting,
II, 2005, Sculpture Hard Board, Ply Wood, Tape, Thread, 6 x 8",
left. Model standing in front of Entering/Exiting IV, 2005, 44 3/4
x 44 3/4", center. |
Kim conjures up fantastic although possible spatial
scenarios that find their relevance in current aesthetic tendencies that
due to new technologies are seeking to examine new possibilities for the
future of art. While the idea of reality and experience have become fluid,
Kim is expanding reality's scope by investigating the limits of space,
mass and physical matter for the purpose of expanding his sculptural means
as well as his perceptual doors. As rigid notions of identity, reality
and space are being challenged, Kim is working to more broadly define
reality in consideration of simulated space as anything from void to computer
generated simulacrum.
The Exiting/Entering series is an installation consisting of thirty-two
paintings, four drawings and two monumental constructions. The thirty-two
paintings depict concave apertures in neutral colors that vary in tone
and that appear to recede spatially. Each of the paintings comprises sixteen
smaller pieces that together make up a panel and appear as one. The two
sculptural works utilize large scored and threaded squares that when collated
represent two shutters that can be read as partially open doors or windows.
Kim's immaculate, serene white surfaces are scored into squares lined
with thread that at once allude to tiled walls, while simultaneously appearing
like doors or windows. Because he conflates the two; wall and door he
broadens our reading as well as our perception. As humans we are shaped
by our unconscious apprehension of our physical environment because it
is experienced subjectively or as it is felt. Newly constructed spaces
outside the normal expectations and not read in a linear fashion can provide
a place that allows for conceptual expansion three dimensionally yet extended
in paradoxical combinations that n potentially lead to shifts in mental
awareness.
Although Char Davies writes about virtual environments and cyberspace,
her ideas can be applied to Kim’s re-ordering of space also. In
conveying her insights she quotes Gaston Bachelard’s words “By
changing space, by leaving the space of one's usual sensibilities, one
enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating.
For we do not change place, we change our nature.[1] Davies discusses
the psychological effects of "changing space" which according
to her are “echoed by psychologists documenting the effects of traditional
contemplative practices in terms of altering states of consciousness.”
Char also agrees with Arthur Deikman's claim in "Deautomatization
and the Mystic Experience," that “the conditions fostered by
such practices involve a dehabituating or "deautomatizing" of
perceptual sensibilities. This process would break the shackles of linear
perception to result in the synthesis of fresh materials allowing for
new readings. Deikman asserts “...Deautomatization is here conceived
as permitting the adult to attain a new, fresh perception of the world
by freeing him from a stereotyped organization built up over the years
by allowing adult synthetic functions access to fresh materials.”
[2] The idea of constructed space can also be associated with Jean Badrillard’s simulacra of the “real that no longer has to be rational, since
it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance….
It is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating
synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.”[3]
Kim’s constructions are made of disposable materials consisting
of paper, pencil crayons, and thread that due to their ephemerality, overturn
the modernist notion of an artwork's timelessness to become synonymous
with contemporaneous coordinates. Kim deflates the notion of the artwork’s
durability confronting us in its stead with disposable commodities that
reference society’s market driven, profit seeking, self- promotional
considerations.
Thalia Vrachopoulos
Exhibitions Director
For Further Information Please Contact:
Thalia Vrachopoulos
212-691-7978
[1] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press,
1966) p. 206 in Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied
Being, (1997) by Char Davies published in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual
Reality, New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company (2001). Pp. 293-300
[2] Arthur Deikman, "Deautomatization and Mystical Experience"
and "Experimental Meditation," in Altered States of Consciousness,
Charles Tart, ed., New York: HarperCollins, 1990, pp. 50, 262-3
[3] Jean Baudrillard, "Simulcra and Simulations" in The Visual
Culture Reader, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Ed., (Routledge Press, London and New
York: 2002) pps. 145-146 |
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