Bang Geul Han and Jenna Gribbon “Implied”

Here Gallery

poster for Bang Geul Han and Jenna Gribbon “Implied”

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HERE presents Implied.

Implied juxtaposes video and work on paper by Bang Geul Han and paintings by Jenna Gribbon. Using mysterious imagery, pointed silences, recurring symbols, and voluntary erasures, both artists share their own stories and those of others through work that invites the viewer to decipher what might be at stake. As connections and contradictions emerge, one is compelled to read the space that lies in between what is said, represented, or performed, reflecting on the difficulty of fully sharing one’s experience and the possibility of revealing more and creating empathy through indirect means of expression.

Illustrating Barthes’ idea that the author (or here, the visual artist) is separate from her work in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny, the work in Implied entrusts us to interpret the possible meaning of each piece, leaving us free to use or disregard the clues and indications the artists have placed in each work.

Gaps in reality dot Bang Geul Han’s video piece, “How and why I became an artist”, where she reveals a combination of harrowing and humorous episodes from her life, only to explain later that some of the information is inaccurate. Another work, three enlarged “pages” of script, transcribes a dialogue taken from a conversation overheard by Han in a public space and then completed by the artist in her studio. Here, fiction overtakes reality, as it is impossible to know what was real and what was invented.

Skewed and absurd communication is also explored in Han’s “Conversation” video piece. A man and a woman sit at a table, uttering words that form rigid, disjointed sentences one might pronounce during a breakup. Each sentence is in fact a tweet pulled out from the social media platform in real time by a custom-made software. The almost robotic nature of the couple’s communication emphasizes the impossibility of their “discussion”, and holds a mirror to our own failures to communicate both in reality and in the digital realm. Finally, in “Referential Gaze”, a series of random statistics are written on the blank face of a woman on a large-scale photograph: “Confidence (True, 3%), Asian (0.99), Happy (17%)” - words that will always fail to define the complexity of the hidden character. The artist invites us once again to wonder if any of these descriptions are accurate, and to fill in the blanks ourselves.

Jenna Gribbon’s paintings also offer an immersion into the partially unknown. Her large painting “Notes” is a surrealist puzzle that presents the viewer with multiple objects, animals, and a single human foot, painted in different manners - large, playful brushstrokes coexist with the extremely precise and seamless execution of certain details -, floating on a blue background. While it is apparent that these images represent specific moments, emotions, or memories for the artist, what they are and what links them to each other will change with each viewer’s collection of references and remembered experiences.

The same concept can be applied to some of Gribbon’s other work in the show: “Various Obscurities” represents a set a feminine hands, heads, and other body parts including a long braid, emerging from breaches in the peach-colored foreground. Punctuation symbols seem to indicate that a story is being told, but the storyline is left completely open. In “Shadow Aspect”, two luminous, vibrant portraits of the same red-haired woman - once with a traditional hairdo, and once with wilder, more natural hair - are divided on the canvas by the editing symbol for “transpose”. Why and how can these two versions of the same woman be switched? It is for the viewer to decide. The juxtaposed symbols, objects, and body parts are an invitation to play with meaning, order, and idea associations that may seem absurd but that contribute to the creation of new narratives in a refreshing, personal use of surrealist ideas.

Since 1993, the award-winning HERE, Kristin Marting, Artistic Director and Kim Whitener, Producing Director, has been one of New York’s premier arts organizations and a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid art from a variety of artistic disciplines— media, visual art, installation, theater, dance, music and opera, puppetry, spoken word and performance art. HERE’s work is challenging and alternative and offers audiences the opportunity to feel that they are part of something new and fresh.

Media

Schedule

from November 02, 2017 to December 23, 2017

Opening Reception on 2017-11-02 from 17:00 to 19:00

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