CulBeat Express
2018.06.22 17:20
건축가 신서영 드로잉전@스페이스 776(6/29-7/8)
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Your Paranoia, My Obsession
Seo Young Shin
June 29 - July 8, 2018
Space 776, Brooklyn
Opening Reception: Saturday June 30, 2018. 6:00 - 10:00pm.
Space 776 is pleased to announce to the opening of the solo show titled Your Paranoia, My Obsession by local New York artist Seo Young Shin. Although born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia the artist spent most of her life in Seoul, South Korea up until her graduation from Hongik University with a Bachelor in Architecture. Following her graduation, Shin ventured to Connecticut where she completed her Master of Architecture at Yale University. She has found success in this endeavor, working as an architect on numerous edifices in cities such as: Seoul, London, Venice, New Haven, and New York. While academically and professionally entrenched in the field of architecture, Shin possess an affinity for illustration which is no doubt the result of all-nighters at the drafting table. Never giving up on her connection with ink and paper, Shin continues to produce illustrated works which draw on the human experience of performativity, lyricism, and temporality.
In the eponymous series of works which comprise her solo show at Space 776, the artist focuses on the rendering of quotidian objects with a simultaneously colorful and myopic precision. The detail with which these objects, such as nail clippers or a wrench, are rendered draws the attention of the viewer to the essential teleological function of these objects. As the audience continues to engage with the series of works an accumulation of vague similarities begins to form in the mind. A lighter, some push-pins, an adjustable spanner, and a socket wrench; each object rendered against a void of white negative space. A presumption would be that these objects are united in this series by their use as tools. Yet some viewers more sensitive to the engaged box cutter or scissors, may read a certain degree of latent violence. It is this duality of teleological function and semiotic application which Shin is inciting through the ostensibly benign depictions of the aforementioned objects.
Bolt cutters can communicate: industriousness, labor, and or masculinity within a context of industry, because in that specific context the teleological function is utilitarian and the bolt cutters are a tool. Imagine, however, the bolt cutters are sitting alone on a table in a dimly lit room filled with people involved with organized crime; the bolt cutters cease to have the former function as utilitarian tool at the whim of the subject. The function and symbolism of the same object instead is for torture and communicates violence. Shin removes any contexts, allowing the viewer to explore an unconscious predisposition towards one of these function/symbols, and in doing so provokes a great discourse of the human relationship with their material world.
- Dante Bellardita Fernández
