Artist Statements
Shane Abad
The ability for the
individual to exist in the world without reference to categories or indexes of
people types, others, or another, i.e. the object of ones affection, is all
but impossible. I am not interested
in creating or exploring this psychology through the same linear constructions
that the Hollywood system sets up and accomplishes. I am interested in the narrative quality
of the situation, but I want to achieve it through a non-linear
construction. The work is about
creating a complex system that the viewer has to work through in order to
understand the pathology of love and relationships with others and the self.
The complexity of
relationship and love–internal, external, personal, and public–is
an area that is ripe for exploration.
The content of the image or sequence of images is important in the
construction of this narrative, but what is implicit, explicit, and implied by
that image is what is of interest.
This along with the absurdity of the content opens up the possibility
for multiple narratives. We are
then left with the task of navigating and understanding the sign system that
exists, but must realize that in this search we are only and always looking at
the self with reference to the gaze of another, again presenting us with the
problem of stereotype and clich.
Tetsuji Aono
Monono Aware
in Japanese directly translates to (what a) pitiful thing! which is a
metaphor for sensitivity toward a thing.
Zen Buddhists/practitioners critically examine and question through the
physical, visual, and sentimental relationship with objects, living beings, and
their surrounding environment to attain enlightenment that breaks through
physical reality.
I am a ceramic sculptor who
experiments with ceramic material and processes, technically and symbolically,
incorporating multi-media environments (video, photographic images, glass,
plastic, fabric, found objects, etc.).
My focus is to create
individual objects as well as a complete environment: display space and re-defining empty
space. My approach is to
reintroduce/reconsider a simultaneously subtle and chaotic space. Its pop-baroque, with familiar
iconographic images from popular culture and its corresponding sub-culture that
is considered to be lo-culture. My
work examines the transformation of the combination of familiar iconographic
(both 2-D and 3-D) images and designs into odd and unconventional looking
objects that are a metaphor for the concept of capitalism in corporate
America.
Humor and pleasure are very
important elements in my work, just as capitalism and the entertainment
industry go hand-in-hand; but unlike my work, their external images are funny
ha-ha, internally funny-peculiar, ambiguous, and
obscure, yet subjectively personal and essential. Although my work can look festive and
joke-like, underneath the contexts are complex and serious: sensitive, Monono Aware. They are
presented through layers of symbolism which present
the fine dividing line between art and entertainment.
Susan Choi
I am interested in making a
connection between truth and fiction in my current body of work. I am particularly interested in
appropriating the dualistic coupling in the following: First, how ones perception of reality
is affected by ones emotional stance.
Second, how one can use
fashion or drag as an outlet for defining ones identity–through which
fantasy can be carried out pragmatically in daily life.
One-Shots is
a one-issue comic book about my own as well as friends life experiences,
fears, and desires intermittent with events traumatic and mundane. Permeating with dissatisfaction,
bitterness, doubt and anxiety, and at the same laden with hopeless romantic
fervor, its visual narrative/storyboard is congruent with how much we live out
what we feel in the moment.
Backyard Desert
is a therapeutic comic book about my handicapped existence of living in an
undesirable small town of Palmdale, California, with my mother. The tragic/bizarre turns to a kind of
drag performance/confessional spectacle, as I make the most of the un-hip
desert suburbia as a backdrop to off-play my fantasies of being an Amazonian
super-sized heroine in a time warp co-existing with dinosaurs and white trash
in the suburbs.
Shit and Hersheys Kisses are erotic
watercolors that are in actuality severe/perverse, and not sexy. The compromised/degraded position of the
nude woman being fucked by a goat or standing naked dropping shit to feed the
goat is disguised by the pale, amateurish style of painting reminiscent of
illustration from a childrens book.
Young Chung
eyes
travel
caress
land that is flesh
eyes
cruise
penetrate
flesh that is land
my hands trace
contours
of land
these
hands cut
edges of
flesh
Scoping across bodies of land
and flesh represented on flat surfaces of books, calendars and magazines, the
viewer travels beyond the confines of an assigned body to explore an intimacy
with these other bodies so often deemed external and foreign. The works visual apparatus reexamines
landscape and body to propose emerging possibilities for interconnection
through reciprocity and recognition beyond
self to include other. Figures cut
from landscapes create an interdependent and intertwining hybrid body image
that flattens and merges background land and foreground flesh.
Every made image of a
landscape conceals an inalienable trace of the projected figure of the maker. For an image of a landscape to exist,
someone had to have photographed it; thus, representations of landscapes are
never unmediated. My work explores
the impulse to conquer and subjugate each other by recasting projections of
personal self onto landscape to offer an renegotiated view cut from the
outlines of an other.
Imagine a landscape, and then
an airplane entering, penetrating it, does it disrupt our viewing pleasure? Or, does the landscape penetrate the
airplane? If so, what would this
look like?
Moi Tsien on Allan deSouza
Allan deSouzas works often
reveal the bodily gestures that lead to their production. Read, then, as performances or at least
as the artifacts of performances, his works also incorporate materials from the
performing body as evidence of its temporal nature, and also to comment on how
his and other bodies are marked by history, geography and culture.
The two works here (both
2007) are the Scratch series,
photographs of the disembodied tresses of various blonde icons that have
epitomized white femininity (and whiteness itself), and whose haloed coifs have
provoked inspiration and imitation, lust and envy, myth and mirth.
Here, the dos, like the
backstage remnants following a drag show or a divine apparition visited upon a
taco shell, are constructed from the artists fingernails and toenails against
backdrops of his beard shavings.
The work Jesus Loves Me, Still (2007) continues deSouzas ongoing series of
animals and human figures made of tissue and semen (a material that as the
artist ages might also indicate a fear of its lessening supply). The installation recalls a story about
Jesus telling Peter the fisherman to follow him and to become instead a fisher
of men. What faith-based musings do
these figures prompt as they dangle helplessly from divine hooks cast by the
Big Fisherman above, and what do they suggest about masculine creativity as their
individual seas also look suspiciously like artist palettes? We may be adrift amongst a sea of men–apostates,
atheists, heretics and sinners all–but Jesus apparently loves us. Still.
Cirilo Domine
I did not intend the work to be funny or humorous at all. The outcome
might be funny but I think wry is the word. Making the work comes from an ironic
acceptance of icky, painful feelings about labeling, status, and value.
I started making the tiaras after finding an image of a conceptually creepy Native
American-themed diamond tiara made by Cartier for an American socialite in the
Gilded Age. And why, with so much poverty, are Filipinos obsessed with
beauty pageants. And why faggots have so many derogatory names for each
other–bean queen, rice queen, potato queen, etc.
The jockstraps are a continuing series that at first explored
inherited craft techniques as well as personal and sexual narratives, but is
now encompassing the history of thread around the world such as linen,
hand-spun Indian cotton, rami, wisteria, and hemp. And–dye
technologies such as indigo which once had a symbolic and functional use.
A collection of souvenirs–Chinatown backscratchers in this case–that
becomes an overwhelming remembrance tied up in knots and a tangled mess that
is both joyful and socially enmeshed.
Finally, toilet seat covers that make you wonder when your ass would be in
contact with the other through that punctured window, and how that protective
bubble would finally burst and make you more intimate with the unknown.
Reanne Estrada
I make works that aspire to be unstable.
Of questionable pedigree and dubious archival quality, they harbor
fluctuating identities and a conspicuous self-destructive streak. My work is best described as
process-intensive, high-relief drawing or low-relief
sculpture. Existing between two and
three dimensions, it faces regular crises of identity and occupies a
vacillating in-between space informed by my immigrant Filipino-American
background.
I use everyday materials and painstakingly gussy them up to pass as art. The works are fine mimics: Ivory Soap passes as ivory, erasers for
smooth stones, wax or candy, packing tape for crystalline formations. Yet for all their aesthetic allure, they
are inherently unstable. They pay
homage to the horror of beauty, defined as the threat of its loss, and embrace
contradictory impulses. Absurdly
labor-intensive to create as art objects, they are encoded with the capacity to
self-destruct almost instantaneously, to undo their identity as art by doing
what they were originally meant to do (erasers to erase, soap to wash). Many works shift between drawing and
sculpture, often compromising physical integrity in the process. Packing tape and erasers are
methodically gutted, surgically cut up, cut out and put back together again;
solid three-dimensional things turned into delicate line drawings.
I produce work very slowly.
Everything is made by hand:
very physical, very analog.
I work this way in part as a response to the mind-boggling pace and
information overload that characterizes everyday life. In a digital age where anything seems
possible, my work is mindful of the body – its limitations, imperfections
and idiosyncrasies. Part meditation
on built-in obsolescence, part concession to the indefatigable forces of
entropy, my work alludes to the fragility of the body and serves as a metaphor
for the mutable, unstable nature of identity.
Pearl C. Hsiung
My work investigates the capabilities and
limits of graphic, hard-edged visual vocabulary as made familiar via cartoons,
design and media in addressing the intangible, the ever-changing,
the awesome and other concepts characteristic of becoming. At times, concepts that are elusive to
human comprehension and perception begin to be represented in my work as
landscapes containing volcanoes, crystals, clouds, rocks and other natural
subjects eligible for meditation and contemplation. However, these forms and their meanings
reside outside a familiar space when, in my work, they exist in a contemporary
context, as if they are subjects in and of contemporary culture. They spurt lips, hair, human decoration.
They absorb surrounding, remote content and commingle with otherwhere
information. I am interested in the
utilization of familiar iconography and imagery, as well as the shared visual vocabulary
and style of the ubiquitous graphic lexicon of contemporary, globalized culture
in addressing the continuity between the artistic, human endeavor of pursuing
personal peace, the post-capitalistic, detached project of offering something
new (whats-in-it-for-me), and that which is beyond our perceivable
contemporality.
Although, the work strives
for profound moments and accomplishments of representation, I am also
interested in the absurdity of the artistic and human goal of achieving such
enlightenment, breakthrough or nirvana.
By engaging in humorous, promiscuous, random and repulsive strategies in
the art making, the work attempts to offset and decenter over-specified meaning(s)
and idealistic goals, disseminating the centers of power and finality that
paralyze ideas from continually evolving, transmogrification and participation
in perpetual becoming.
Yong Soon Min on Byoung Ok Koh
Byoung Ok Koh is known for
his wry and witty sculptures that playfully scrutinize familiar objects and
materials. These works deploy basic
sculptural properties of scale and gravity in unexpected and uncanny
proportions, juxtapositions and compositions to de-familiarize and re-orient
viewers expectations. His Roller Coaster for Snail consists of a
room-sized model of a roller coaster in which the elaborate web of supports is
traversed by a snail. The figure of
speech, a snails pace is inevitably conjured in the absurdly amusing
juxtaposition of the two sculptural entities. Unadorned and seemingly matter-of-fact
like their plainspoken titles, Hair Fly
and Toothbrush employ deft, subtle
modifications of the original objects to generate a disproportionate effect on
the viewer. In David Pagels review
of one of Kohs solo exhibitions, the artist is commended for paying attention
to seemingly incidental detailsthat even after you figure out what youre
looking at, your interest doesnt diminish. LA
Times writer Christopher Knight comments that Kohs interests have the
thoughtful flavor of Conceptual work by the late Felix Gonzales-Torres,
although the young artist employs more distinctly sculptural means. Noted for their graceful ephemerality
and gentle trickery (Pagel), Kohs sculptures enliven the everyday and the
mundane with captivating insights.
Javier Peres on Terence Koh
Once he (Koh) finished his
works for Zurich, Terence did 2 performances, one public, very much public as
you know– Sprungkopf, and another one that
was very much private, so private only I (Javier Peres) saw it and documented
it....the resulting works are a video and a photo, both by the same title, 4 26 which alludes to the length of
the performance itself....in it, Terence again conceals his face/identity, but
exposes his tight, fit body to utter exhaustion as he was wearing very high
prostitute/tranny style patent leather, knee high heels, which he slit open
(like a Fontana) so as to dramatize their effect when he moved...the resulting
work is at once gorgeous, and repugnant, stylized and ad hoc, but what comes
through the most is his amazing ability to transform himself into a sculptural
object, yet still infused with desire and want...
kozyndan
kozyndan is a Los Angeles-based team of artist/illustrators
known for their digitally painted pencil drawings of contemporary urban
cityscapes and surreal interior spaces.
Comprised of husband and wife Dan and Kozue Kitchens, kozyndan creates
both fine art and commercial projects, and has been showcased internationally
to much critical acclaim.
The duo met in a painting
class in college in the late 1990s.
They began collaborating, and the result has been a series of personal
works that often reflect their affection–and repulsion–for the
rampant urban sprawl and technological overload that characterize everyday city
life. Their detailed drawings
portray realistic urban panoramas, which on closer inspection reveal often absurd scenarios.
In one, for example, elderly Chinese women, armed only with dim-sum, stave off an aerial attack on San Franciscos
Chinatown, while in another, marauding day-glo bunnies take on Manhattan. According to Dan, the pairs work
portrays their unease with and love of the modern world.
Koznydans other work
includes album covers for Weezer, John Mayer, Daedelus, Lyrics Born, and the
Postal Service, as well as magazine illustrations for Colors, Tokion, Relax, Giant Robot, XLR8R, among
others. They have also done
commercial projects for RES Fest, Electronic Arts, Converse, Nike, Wieden+Kennedy
and Idn, and they have produced an array of products featuring their artwork,
including posters, books (their first, Urban Myths, was recently
published by early supporters Giant Robot)
and t-shirts. The couple has also
exhibited work in galleries and museums from Los Angeles to Toronto, London,
and Australia.
Dinh Q. L
Moira Roth, excerpt from
Obdurate History: Dinh Q. L, the
Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory Art
Journal (Summer 2001)
In an email to me dated December
13, 1999, Le describes Lotus Land. The piece is about the birth defects in
Vietnam as a result of the chemical defoliant (Agent Orange) used by the U.S.
Army during the Vietnam War. One of
the effects has been a tremendous increase in Siamese twins born in Vietnam.
... Most of the twins do not survive due to limited expertise and facilities
here. I have found that in some
villages where the children are born, they are starting to worship them. The
villagers believe that the children are special spirits. ... What is
fascinating to me is that some Vietnamese deities also have multiple arms,
legs, and heads. The piece grows
out of my fascination with the idea of collapsing distance between mythology
and reality.
Chanika Svetvilass article
on Le, The Art of War, [Dialogue
(Spring-Summer 1999): 27-28] contains Les account of Damaged Gene, a
public project created in Ho Chi Minh City in August 1998: I rented a kiosk in the open market and
sold handmade clothing for conjoined twins. The clothes were embroidered with names
of companies that produced Agent Orange....I also sold
Siamese twin figurines and T-shirts printed with statistics about the use of Agent
Orange and the damaging genetic effect it has had in Vietnam. The project is a big departure for me....Culturally I was bringing a taboo subject and putting it
right in the middle of the market for one month. It was the scariest opening I have ever
held. My kiosk no longer exists,
but I am planning to raise money to open a permanent shop. This time I hope to have international
artists participation in designing T-shirts and creating objects for the shop.
The profits will be donated to
medical facilities that treat children suffering from dioxin.
Candice Lin
Located at the site of psychological conflict, my work focuses on the blurry
and ever changing boundaries between longing and disturbance. Intertwining archetypal myths and
colonial histories with personal narratives, the confessional takes on a mythic
tone while the fairy tale closes in with odd familiarity. My work often
borrows a formal style or even adapts specific imagery from such historical
sources as the 16th century engravings from the Discovery of America travelogue by Theodore de Bry or the Casta
Paintings of 17th-18th century New Spain. Utilizing strategies of
potential secret-telling and ornate, intimate details, I lure viewers in,
inviting them to come closer and deeper, until they recognize, within the world
they have entered, a visualization of their own hidden desires, beliefs, and
memories. This intermeshing of
personal myths with cultural ones forms a mimetic and miniature world which, in a manner similar to voodoo, needles into the
larger social body, the physical world...infecting, enriching, and sharing the
blood. This gesture positions the created world as simultaneously fantastic
and hauntingly realistic.
Sandra Low
With bunny hugs and bunny
hops,
Kiss the canvas
Spiked by a one-two punch!
Mine the myths that lace the
cultural gumbo
Of these Multi-States of
Mind!
The perpetually deferred
promise of consumer bliss haunts our dreams
To be loved
and lovable.
Ball humping and bible
thumping,
Transfixed before the
one-eyed monster,
We shoot ourselves to
entertain our media messengers
Serviced by remote corporate
control.
Searching for our real selves
By searching the shelves
Lined with supersized and
spring scents,
Low-fat slingbacks that come
in your choice
Of midnight berry and
supermoist cherry.
Deploying surface to air lip
gloss,
Nursing the loss of assorted
body parts
As frosted Pop Tarts rain
from the sky.
Looking underneath yellow
fevered dreams
To pick at Made in China
labels
That wont rub off.
Sandeep Mukherjee
My work strives to articulate
those instances in which explicit distinctions known to us through science, art
and culture blur and fade into one another. A hybrid space that is
informed by my personal and trans-cultural experience. From the desire to escape an essentialized
identification with my Indian-ness (cultural origins) to the embrace of a
nomadic and contaminated sense of post-colonial identity, I have sought to find
a voice that is authentic, innovative and poetic.
For the past several years, I
have been making drawings, installations and abstract paintings in which the
tension between pictorial and sculptural space not only underscores the
viewers physical presence but also activates the entire space in which both
the artwork and viewer exist.
Historically, a multiplicity
of references are brought together–the Baroque, Pop Art, Minimalism, spiritual
abstraction, Indian miniature paintings, illuminated manuscripts, classical
figurative sculpture–to explore phenomenological relations between light
and space, figure and ground. From
the earlier self portraits to the more recent abstractions, my interest remains
in making the hybrid object–part painting, part drawing, part sculpture
and part environment.
My intention in making work
that negotiates a wide range of cultures, genres and media is philosophically driven.
Emphasizing materiality and
exactitude, while also being perceptually mutable and incorporeal, the fusion
aspires to become a conduit to another dimension of experience where the
personal meets the epic. Where the
possibilities are many and ultimately open ended for the viewers to inscribe
for themselves.
Uudam Nguyen
In this exhibition, I present
three sculptural works: Thinking Rock, Love Buttons and SOB. Thinking
Rock is a sculpted rock with an aluminum thought bubble on top. The two LED signs on the thought bubble
carry messages that tell the story of the rock. Stories are written and uploaded
electronically into the LED by a computer and can be altered to suit a specific
location. I also invite writers to contribute
their own stories to Thinking Rock.
Love Buttons
is a sound sculpture installation consisting of hundreds of buttons hanging on walls
in four rows at eye level. Suspended
from the ceiling are ten thought bubbles. Embedded in each of the thought bubbles
is a CD walkman that plays thousands of different
epithets recorded using a computer voice. Buttons emblazoned with the same epithets
are free for the public to take. Each epithet begins with, Honey, tonight
I will fuck you as Love Buttons is about love and swappable identities.
Love-in-the-Make and Sixty-Nine, two
life-size sculptures made out of sheet metal and automotive paint, are both
part of the SOB (Sex, Orgy and Beyond)
series. The SOB works playfully take on the play of power through sexual
intercourse. The use of the
symbolic two-headed-dildo-with-condoms-on is a way to represent the
vulnerability of all involved in sex. In addition, it also shows that sex is
not about one person having power over the other but an intricate balance of
both sides in the process. We can
think of these works as continuing the tradition of art depicting sex and
romance from antique Greek vases to Indian temple sculptures, from Auguste
Rodins The Kiss, Constantin
Brancusis work of the same title, to other contemporary artists such as Ed Kienholzs
Back Seat Dodge 38.
Kaz Oshiro
We are living in an environment where we are surrounded by all kinds of
objects, and these objects often become second nature to us and soon we begin
to care less about them. In that
sense, objects exist just like the environmental noise that we are no longer
sensitive to. John Cage and his friends have argued that even irritating
ordinary noise can be valuable, like chamber music with its own will. Their argument recommends putting
existing sounds on the same table and proposes that there is an
anti-hierarchical sentiment within every sound in the world.
I think I am recomposing objects as noise for my environment by using common
painters materials. Im interested
in these objects I see that at first irritate, then are ignored. I
remember and reformat them by using the painters vocabulary. Thus, ideally my objects may be placed
in any condition at any place without identification that labels the objects as
art. Hopefully, my works transcend
the chaotic aspect in our ambience as does environmental
noise.
Joseph Santarromana
Tears of a Clown
I have been actively creating new works in multimedia (photography,
installation, computer generated imaging and animation, digital video, and
performance) since 1990, and continue to produce works that incorporate the
personal psychological/perceptual experience and the objective/tangible/urban
landscape. The focus of many of my works is on the relationships of
superimposed ideas/concepts on innate feelings/beliefs that guide the viewers gaze (both outwardly and inwardly). This
multimedia approach to addressing issues of subjectivity is intended to bring
the viewer into contact with his/her own sense of empathy with the environment
and situation of others/self.
I am contributing two video
installations for this show: The Tears That is My Body (1993-2007)
and Malambing Thang (2007). Malambing Thang is a
collaboration with artist/musician/composer William Roper. Roper–operating within and across
disciplines–deals with the peculiar history of Africans in America, the
integration of religion and myth in modern life, and issues of an individuals
self-defined location within society.
His work is multilayered, allowing access from and interpretation on many
levels.
Alice Konitz on Anna Sew Hoy, written on the occasion
of the show Nothing up the Sleeve
(September 2006), curated by Samara Caughey, at the Glendale College Art
Gallery
Like most physically
seductive things, Annas sculptures are full of blobs, knots, holes, pedestals,
bundles, legs and tunnels. These
are combined with events, friends who drink hundreds of cans of Sapporo, dainty
little chains, perfume, trees, feathers, stickers, and contrived
Dali-articles. And then there are
some words, like the word Blacknoir, which takes a certain kind of shape,
color and material that is different from black and different from noir as
well.
Acid-wash jeans woven through
a ceramic structure and raised off the floor about
three feet high with steel pipe. It
takes place in an era when I wore acid-wash jeans and liked iridescent things:
mid-to-late 80s in southern California.
With this Im given location and time in addition to materials and
height. Maybe there is a moment of
recollection of the specified time and place, or a fake memory of a moment that
never happened in the 80s but is constructed in 2006 and grafted into a time
that seems to support these materials.
The memory seems as much personal as it could be collective, accessible
to most who were teenagers in California in the late eighties and probably, by
association, to a much wider circle.
Im given the information
about time and place with the statement: I dont know if you need to know
this. I can relate. I never know how much additional or
personal information I would want to know or would give to anyone because the
information might obstruct the complex information that is there to understand
from what is seen or given with the work.
Niphan Suwannakas
I believe that humans are the most
beautiful creatures that exist in nature. Humans can be distinguished from animals
because we have been given a thought process that often creates illusions about
how we perceive the world around us. When humans use one of their senses,
signals are sent to the brain; the brain then associates the sense with an
experience that occurred in the past or the present which causes us to feel a
certain way emotionally.
In one day, the human mind is
constantly thinking and constantly dispersing many types of feelings. Moreover, humans tend to create more
negative feelings than positive ones. Most of the time, our own suffering stems
from the worries concerning the unknown future. And, throughout our lives we also
experience lots of mixed emotions that cause us to worry more than we really
should and all this worrying can lead us into depression.
We believe that material
possessions such as cars, computers, televisions, radios, and telephones can
truly make us happy, but we are often wrong. These things only make us happy for a
short period of time. The more
machines and products are developed for our pleasure and convenience, the more
our minds sink into a pit of suffering because we allow these things to control
us.
We dont really know how the
human mind works, nor do we know how to control our own minds. We allow ourselves to accept whatever
feelings we have at a given moment without questioning it; this can be
disastrous to our lives. Perhaps,
if we learn how to control our minds, we can live happier lives. And, if humans can keep their emotions at
a medium rate (not too emotionally high or low), they can function better on
many levels.