'If I can bend, I will move' Group Show
February 20th to 26th at Snetha, Athens, Greece.
Curator: Myrto Katsimicha
In a state of perpetual fragmentation, never bounded nor complete, we hold on to our senses. Bringing together the works of Elísabet Birta Sveinsdóttir and Jae Youl Jeoung developed over their two-month residency in Athens, this exhibition unfolds as an overwrapping story for the ever-changing ways we traverse the Athenian landscape, through our minds and our senses. The aesthetics of the city with its symbols, primordial images and patterned thoughts serve as a backdrop for a dig into a series of inborn tendencies. The title of the show references Virgil’s seminal line “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (“If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.”, Aeneid, VII, 312) that Freud also chose as the epigraph for his treatise on The Interpretation of Dreams, in a way picturing our ongoing effort to move while unearthing and confronting our repressed instinctual impulses.
Interested in the relationship between subject and object, Jae Youl Jeoung’s artistic practice is comprised of sculptural elements that altogether evoke an imperceptible yet affective experience accessed through the interrelations amongst earthy objects and small-scale paintings. Disparate elements that give the form to a single poem. At times grounded and on others seemingly floating within the space they inhabit Jeoung’s works are an exploration into the different positions of the vertical and the horizontal exerted by the gravitational force that makes things keep standing. In his new work “Flesh and Stone” solid yet fragile forms, susceptible to natural phenomena and subjected to their encounter with the human body, are scattered in small assemblages that are seemingly rooted and yet still rise one by one, somehow dividing the space into territories without boundaries. Walking around something we can never get to the center of, like scavengers of discarded odds, we look for the clues of our material memories constantly zooming in and out of our temporal and spatial self. Ideas of visibility and invisibility, the stillness of time, the notion of the empty space and its reflective potential, emerge to remind us how to look more carefully in the spaces that lie in-between. The story unfolds with the falling seed that piles up and gradually disappears amongst the ruins of the inner and outer spaces from which our personal and collective consciousness is constantly casted.
Room 1
Included 5 works.
The exhibition presents most conscious of the scattering of the flesh surrounding the columns. The column is the metaphor of substantially rooted form in this context. The shapes of the pieces one by one rise to the ground and it origins. It is the potential power of the seed and the destructive power.
They are fragile and translucent. The small elements are assembled together and the power is divided into three territories.
The stairs that exist to equate the stairway to the sky and the stairway to the sea are the birth of the ground, and the way down again is the stairway. It shows that there are no starting and ending points.
'Stall', 2019, and 'Platform 2', 2019
Cast the fabricated styrofoam of readymade appliances.
22.5 x 53 x 18.5(cm), and 46 x 14.5(cm).
The are where I used live and work is called 'Kypseli'. It has been called the "Concrete Jungle". Because of the grayish color of architecture and influenced by brutalism architecture form. The views from up to the sky seems tangle of myriad trees like the jungle.
The styrofoam, which used to wrap for protecting the appliances and necessities. That was intriguing to think as a new style of Greek statues. They are reminiscent of modern Greek statues. Therefore, I started to collect all these fragments walking around the neighborhood. And fabricated each elements and created a casting mold.
According to these practices, it created a statue with a modern reinterpretation.
'Platform 1', 2019
Cast the fabricated styrofoam of readymade appliances.
22.5 x 47(cm).
'Two columns', 2019
Acrylic on canvas.
9 x 12(cm).
The flesh around is a series of death and birth, but the column is like space and time that being given in our lives.
'Seed balls', 2019
Flower seed, clay powder, and soil.
Variable size.
Whether it is blown in the wind or passively transferred by human, it settles down where it roots. The fog emerges frizzy of the birth.
Visitors to the exhibition are obliged to take this circular soil sphere and throw it in the field wherever they are. It bears the seeds of a 'Gypsophil; baby's breath'.
Room 2
Included 4 works.
Installation view of works, '105 & 21', 2019, and 'Stairs', 2019.
'105 & 21', 2019
Plaster with pigment.
105 x 105(cm).
A total of 105 stairs have been casted by 5x5 size of staircase mold, and each of them stack up in more subtle.
The level of 21 steps, are describe relatively different slopes to opposite side.
'Stairs', 2019
Acrylic on canvas.
12 x 9(cm).
Stairs are too low to reach the sky.
'A walking stick', 2019, and 'Armor of olive seeds', 2019
Installation view.
Columns that are raised from the ground to the sky.
'A walking stick', 2019
Plaster, cement, and wood.
130 x 11(cm).
It is our two legs, a cane, and the nature form of wooden stick.
'Armor of olive seeds', 2019
Aluminum.
Variable size.
Seeds that are in the inner firmness rather than the pulp of the juice.
The largest olive tree in Greece could be found through the new friends and their helps. The two-month residence was heavily influenced by Greek mythology and architecture.
Seeds peel off and take their lives as new births. They are brave and noble.