Latitude

Rush Arts Gallery & Resource Center

On View February 3 - March 28, 2009

Opening reception: Friday, January 30, 6 - 8 PM

In the many modes that latitude can describe place on both a personal and global scale, Sung Jin Choi, Brendan Fernandes, Mona Kamal, Sungmi Lee, Vered Sivan and Jessica Vaughn investigate the complexities of mixed cultural identity and the increasingly unstable political and emotional notions of homeland. Each approaches visual narrative and representation uniquely yet shares a communal emphasis on material and process. The line is often articulated as a symbol that references memory, points of departure and linking of time and space. Much like the longitudinal and latitudinal lines of the globe, the highly-detailed, repetitive quality in these works highlights the prescribed parameters of the gallery space and challenges this rigidity to further complicate the boundary of experiences. Ideological constructs and pre-existing binaries are deconstructed as these six artists come together in this installation-based exhibition to redefine notions of identity, authenticity and heritage outside of a hegemonic vernacular. 

Curator: Nico Wheadon, Associate Curator

— Excerpt from the exhibition catalog

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In her mostly-white drawings, sculptures, installations and photographs, Sungmi Lee transforms industrial materials and office supplies (plastic zip ties, push pins, tape, steam) to transcend their intended purpose. The artist’s repetitive and detail-oriented drawings Sticker Drawing (Sticking My Memory Together) and Blue Karma 101 reveal that the constancy and transparency of the monochrome and perhaps more illusory than we might assume. 

Melting it, melting me, a hanging sculpture of a melted biomorphic mass the size of the artist’s body, was made by repurposing broken car windows found in Lee’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Transforming the residue of violence into an object of meditation, the artist captures an ephemeral moment. In between liquid and solid, the sculpture is both testament to and refutation of the possibility of belonging to an refutation of the possibility of belonging to two distinct times.

— Written by Thomas J. Lax