ARTIST STATEMENT
In these sculpture works, I use generic objects such as mass manufactured Korean and American household items and other widely purchasable items as foundations or canvases for framing the Neutral and erotic.
Caviar: Transparency and (Édouard Glissant’s) opacity have at it in this delicacy, where “caviar” has become a metonym for a generic, location- and culture-independent kind of exotic. My Asian mother is at once foreign in an exotic-banal sense and intimately close, consumable and unknowable. The registers in which I, as an artist, present her to myself and others affect my own legibility.
Comfort: As an immigrant kid, I envied how generic objects circulated with certainty and ease; among both losers and winners, their names and utility were never subject to taunting or question. Here, I articulate a proposal to myself of belonging, comfort and ease through culturally generic (Korean and American) spoons. Alternately solid and airy, rigid and elastic, cool and warm, the hammocks spoon the human spine, evoking nourishing, primal and erotic comfort and the “sleep” of the Neutral, and express subtle differences within and between them, evoking the embrace of idiosyncrasy as well as the fantasy of stability wrought by identifiably distinct cultures. Through parallelism and repetition, difference is at once cradled or held and vacated or lost; the comfort of resting in an ordered form is agitated by the sharp fragility and hardness of the wires and spoons.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
I am an artist and writer committed to integrated approaches to honesty. (In)visibility and (in)vulnerability, and world-generating dynamics of entanglement and truthful paradox, recur as practices, tools or puzzles I explore through my mixed media, project-based work.
© Jennie E. Park