Jewyo Rhii “Commonly Newcomer”
Queens Museum of Art
This event has ended.
Since the early 1990s, Jewyo Rhii has worked in sculptural installation, video, drawing, performance and publications. Constantly displacing herself from her native Seoul, Korea, to study and work in Western Europe and the US, Rhii has come to embrace this fluid lifestyle as an integral part of her process, in such a way that her studios have functioned as exhibition spaces, and exhibition spaces as studios. Having occupied a studio space at the Queens Museum since November 2013, Rhii developed this sprawling sculptural installation, with its multiple components, to materialize her transplantation to the borough of Queens.
Rhii explores the intuitive and experiential aspects of being a newcomer. Bringing to the fore both the psychology and physicality, her installation can only be experienced as the visitor actively moves through the gallery space and observes the various components both individually and as a single body. The installation pieces together fragments of Queens as the artist has lived it—a rooftop of a low-rise building as glimpsed from the elevated subway track, fences of houses, and snippets of daily life as seen on the streets. These are visual coincidences and physical uncertainties of local color perceived by Rhii, often with a sense of hesitation, discomfort, and pure awe.
Commonly Newcomer is also an extension of a collaborative publication titled Outside the Comfort Zone, written by Irene Veenstra, a Dutch art historian who visited Rhii’s 2013 exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, for nine consecutive days. During this time, Veenstra wrote a wide-ranging, impressionistic text that touched on her own life, art history, and contemporary issues, using the works in Rhii’s exhibition as a jumping-off point. In Commonly Newcomer, Rhii experiments with re-materializing a textual incarnation of her previous work, while adopting and adapting it into her present life in Queens.
Media
Schedule
from October 11, 2014 to February 08, 2015
Opening Reception on 2014-11-01 from 16:00 to 19:00