"Summer Selections at API" Exhibition
Art Projects International
This event has ended.
Art Projects International presents Summer Selections – Jean Shin, Gwenn Thomas, Pouran Jinchi, Richard Tsao and IL Lee. The artists’ most recent works are on view along with their early important works.
Jean Shin’s Altered Trophies, from her project Everyday Monuments, celebrates the unsung heroes of our society whose everyday labors go unrecognized. Starting with donated sports trophies, Shin transforms each figure’s sports-star pose into an unsensational yet distinctive gestures of work. Each set of altered trophies becomes a small tribute to people who deliver packages, vacuum, shovel, sew, etc. each day. In Shin’s earlier series of relief prints, Pressed, the artist has used a collographic process—taking her own blouse, pair of jeans and coat and deconstructing them into fabric cut outs and seams to create the printing surface. Collectively the collagraphs make up a self-portrait and are related to Shin’s 2004 MoMA installation Cut Outs and Suspended Seams, a portrait of the MoMA staff.
Gwenn Thomas’s recent series entitled Soundings continues her reference to sound as an underlying component of her color etchings including the series Echoes, Song, Amplitude, and Sonancy. Going beyond suggestions of synesthetic associations between color and sound, Thomas’s Soundings work have the viewer thinking of the measurement of unplumbed depths through title, hue and carefully arranged forms. This series can be seen as an extension of some of her work in another medium, her earlier Dream and Dream-Mirror collage paintings.
Pouran Jinchi’s early text work Untitled, based on poetry, is on display. This bold work with its deep red calligraphic marks aided by a confident approach shows one side of Jinchi’s studies of the visual and text and its content. Coming more than ten years later are the Tajvid works. These paintings present an aesthetic re-rendering of the pronunciation marks from pages of different Qorans. What is left out is the text itself. The diacritical marks Jinchi has rendered would help a reader precisely emulate the sound of divine speech, but here, untethered, they become yet another visual form of communication.
Richard Tsao’s Freeze is of his most recent work on canvas. Those familiar with Tsao’s work will recognize his unrestrained use of color which seems to appropriately present itself in just the right balance. A look into Tsao’s studio and at his process helps explain. He manipulates pure pigment with an alchemist’s instincts in an approach that leaves his works in process, his floor, his walls and much else vibrantly colored. Tsao works with focused abandon on a group of paintings until after two or three years of labor, and what seems a duplication of the original chaos, he can bring forth a selected element, an artwork.
Il Lee’s 1984 work on board and his latest acrylic and oil stick work on canvas will allow viewers to consider the breadth of approaches and media Lee has used in his investigations of drawing, of the negative and its positive, of line and form and of what is rendered and what is there but not rendered. Lee has become well known for his ballpoint pen works on canvas and paper, such as Untitled 978Q, ballpoint pen on paper, which will provide a touchstone between the other two works as the viewer appreciates how Lee’s monolithic focus has created a universe at once cohesive and yet still expanding in all directions.
Media
Schedule
from June 17, 2010 to July 15, 2010
Artist(s)
Jean Shin, Gwenn Thomas, Pouran Jinchi, Richard Tsao, IL Lee