Panorama - Review
BULLPEN - KAAC at Tryst Alternative Art Fair
Korean American Artist Collective presents BULLPEN, a group show opens this weekend at Tryst Alternative Art Fair
August 24 - 25 2024
12-6 PM PST
Eunsoo Jeong, Mary Laube, Michelle S. Cho, Jeffrey Yoo Warren, Dave Young Kim, Cha, Yuree, Julie Yeo, Dana Weiser, Yunhee Min, SooMi Han, j. eunsun, Victoria Jang, SoYoung Shin, Jeffery Sun Young Park
via the Korean American Artist Collective: Current programming within the mainstream art world suggests the opposite of my experience: curating a group of artists belonging to the same ethnicity is intricate and perplexing, rife with problematic landmines. Yet in 2024 alone, Los Angeles has seen four group exhibitions from major art institutions utilizing race and identity as an organizing methodology. This approach to curation—an implicit discussion of value within the realms of representation—raises complex questions around identity and the politics of representation. And, as a Korean American artist myself, I am confronted by my own lens with every curatorial decision that I make. As Adrian Piper wrote, "I may not look clearly with my own eyes, but I try to see my own eyes clearly."
Each decision leads me down a rabbit hole of questioning: what kind of representation acknowledges the vastness of identity? More specifically, what does a nuanced representation of “Koreanness” look like? Consequently, when does representation become irresponsible?
Curating a show on the basis of identity requires an understanding of what it is—and to define it, is to confine it. Here we come across the first landmine (representation is a dangerous business so it’s useful to have a trusty, mine-sniffing rat by your side). When you are born othered, you have no choice but to define yourself with, or against, the language of the oppressor. This begs the question: who, exactly, is this taxonomy for?
Additionally the existence of identity-based group shows suggests a saccharine homogeneity within communities. The word, reductive, comes to mind. I resent these trappings, and the anxieties of which are symptomatic of scarcity mindset. The pressure to “get it right”, the responsibility of representation, lays twice as heavy on the marginalized.
Looking towards feminist and queer strategies, perhaps the beginning of an intervention looks like shifting our language around identity: choosing to craft long-winded, wandering definitions that ebb and flow, expand and contract, rather than restrict.
Koreanness is a verb. It’s fickle—if you imagine the Korean diaspora as an object in empty space, from one angle it can look approachable and sweet. Nonthreatening. Take a few more steps, and just as quickly as you breathe in, that same pleasantness transforms into explosive anger. It surprises you, this violent shift, so you hesitate to get closer. You move with caution. A different viewpoint suggests an object that is riddled with generational trauma. Impenetrable. Wearing golf clothes, hands clasped behind a slightly curved back. It’s contradictory: a knife with a fuzzy, light pink handle, hanji origami made of clay. It’s secretive: Korean skincare as soft power, K-pop as K-MK Ultra. It’s stubborn: like a herd of bulls.
BULLPEN is a group show made up of Korean American artists who expand upon the definitions of “Koreanness”, by their very existence. Each artist employs a deeply explorative practice while standing firm in their identities—of which cannot be defined in a sentence. If Koreanness is a verb, the thing that binds Korean Americans is the action of.
The title BULLPEN can be defined in two ways: medical professionals refer to nurses stations as fishbowls or bullpens, which serves as a direct acknowledgement of the re-use of this former-hospital-turned-art-fair. It also connotes a space where ideas, energy, spirit, are contained momentarily. Like a pause. A kind of waiting room where physical manifestations of conceptual and material explorations converge momentarily—a brief respite before embarking on their long, and separate journeys.
Outta Time - Joshua Bienko and Lester Merriweather at Tristar Arts
The work of both artists questions how to capture and represent the world within a system wrought with institutionalized inequity for the sake of capital gain. Bienko’s imagery of designer brands and luxury watches are accompanied by cartoon figures and tigers whose facial expressions contain a complex array of emotional states. Merriweather’s sculptural and collage works vary in material and image, expressing the inextricable connection between culture and commerce, and the colonial steppingstones we continue to walk on toward late capitalism. The strength of this show is not in the works didacticism, but the works ability to present problems, with incomplete answers. It is in our willingness to accept incompleteness that we can near the orbit of truth...
White Hot Magazine - Review
"I Will Name Myself in the Dark" at Morgan Lehman Gallery
May 16 - June 15 2024
Between Two Palms, acrylic on panel, 12” x 12”
Mary Laube
via Morgan Lehman Gallery
Morgan Lehman Gallery is thrilled to present our first solo presentation of paintings by Mary Laube, I Will Name Myself in the Dark. Laube excavates her own cultural narratives to allow us access to her complex transnational life between Korea and the United States. She challenges us to reconsider reductive colonial perspectives by visually depicting the formation of memory, culture, and identity as a dynamic and destabilizing process.
In her color-drenched works on wood panels, abstraction and representation coexist, reflecting patterns and forms observed by Laube during visits to museums in her birth city of Seoul. Korean wrapping cloths, ink stones, Buddhist statues, and the imagery of folk paintings are abstracted and flattened out across each picture plane. Yet, through a careful manipulation of color and value, her arrangements of shapes manage to also ascend toward a rich illusory space.
Throughout the exhibition, cultural allusions to both the United States and Korea are intricately layered and synthesized into compositions that challenge our sense of certainty and equilibrium. Laube’s stunning optical vibrations of color, in particular, serve to keep each composition in a constant state of motion and render palpable her own feelings of perpetual disequilibrium. Every painting on view is imbued with a deeply internalized understanding of displacement, reunion, decolonization, memorial, and personal myth.
Elysia Mann’s Long Long Game Game at the Wilson Gallery, Georgetown College
At the age of 16 Albert Einstein famously imagined what it would be like to travel on the front end of a light beam. Despite the fixed speed of light of 299,792,458 meters per second, he discovered that our perception of time is relative depending on our unique position in space. While illustrating the science of Einstein’s theory is extracurricular for our purposes, it serves as a useful picture for entering Elysia Mann’s current exhibition Long Long Game Game at The Wilson Gallery at Georgetown College. Through a combination of various materials, images, text, macro, and micro scales, Mann considers the biggest questions of life and death through the lens of play. In this regard, play mustn’t be brushed off as mere frivolity, but rather celebrated as a pillar of imaginative thinking, especially when considering the creative capacity of thinkers such as Einstein…
Scraps of Geography
In her recent collection of poems Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems, Cheng explores the border and border-lessness between the body and home, mythology and memory, and the vastly deep internal experience of living a life. When reading Cheng’s work, I am reminded of floating upon water, gazing skyward, ears submerged in a space that allows me to hear inside my own body. The sound appears like echoes from the outside, dampened by the edges of the container I am in, my skin perhaps, as I pick up traces of the external world…
“Han 한” at Culture House
KAAC Presents Han 한 at Culture House
September 2-30, 2023
via the Korean American Artist Collective:
Washington D.C. - The Korean American Artist Collective (KAAC) is pleased to present Han, the inaugural KAAC exhibition at Culture House. The exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, moving imagery, multimedia installations, poetry and contemporary Korean craft from artists who represent the vast terrain of the Korean American experience. Curated by Julia Chon and He-Myong Woo, this group exhibition, composed entirely of KAAC members, explores the significance of han, a term that epitomizes the Korean ethos for us in the diaspora. Han is an elusive concept used to describe a set of complex emotions connected to various long-standing effects of colonialism, war, division, and displacement. It emerged controversially during the Japanese colonial period and marks the suppressed and unresolved traumas of our elders. It manifests in each of us uniquely yet tethers us together.
Inspired by Sandra So Hee Chi Kim’s scholarship on the postcolonial roots of han and E.J. Koh’s poem, American Han, this exhibition brings together a spectrum of Korean American voices. Participating artists represent a diverse range of identities across class, gender, and spirituality, including descendents from the many waves of American immigration, transracial adoptees, and multiethnic Koreans. This exhibition considers the intangibility of han as the key to poetic potential. Han, more than the narrow constraints of ethnic Korean identity, infuses within the artists an expansive understanding of their shared history, heritage and future. In doing so, the range of contemporary artists and art included constructs a collective narrative that will contribute to and transform the discourse around the constantly changing edges of cultural identity.
KAAC is a group of artists dedicated to supporting, building, and amplifying works that are politically, socially, and culturally engaged, and rooted in the Korean American experience. Their mission is to provide resources and opportunities for artists to collaborate and tell their stories, thereby presenting the Korean American experience in all of its complexity and diversity. They believe that building solidarity with and providing support for Korean American artists will bring about a more just and liberatory future.
Artists: Aaron Chung, Andre Lee Bassuet, Carolyn Yoo, Chris Yi Suh, Coleen Baik, Dan-ah Kim, Dave Young Kim, Eunsoo Jeong, Hannah Bae, He-myong Woo, Jason Chang, Jeffrey Yoo Warren, Jonie Broecker, Julia Chon, Kaela Han, Mary Laube, Michelle Cho, Robert Choe-Henderson, Rochelle Youk, Steph Rue, Thad Higa
"Parallel to the Earth" at New Harmony Contemporary
New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art at University of Southern Indiana
August 12 to September 16, 2023
Tennessee Triennial: Re-PAIR
A major statewide contemporary art event organized by Tri-Star Arts. Consulting Curator: María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
Excerpt from Knoxville Museum of Art:
“Responding to the Triennial RE-PAIR theme about art designed “To heal, suture, and recompose fractured bodies”, “re-pair, patch, rebuild spirits, bodies, cities, political institutions, economic relationships,” the Knoxville Museum of Art presents works emphasizing the transformative power of art to propose new solutions to recent global discord.
…
The exhibited works address a broad range of conceptual concerns ranging from the intersection of the personal and the political, to environmental, cultural, and spiritual. They express artists’ deep interest in material as a means of interpreting and amplifying these concerns. They are touched and pressed, deconstructed, constructed and made anew. They embody histories that sensitively embrace contradiction and complication, and that challenge diverse audiences to look both forward and backwards towards “new sites of encounters with yet undefined edges, borders and territories” in search of RE-PAIR.”
Participating artists include:
Willie Cole, Bessie Harvey, Lonnie Holley, Katie Hargrave & Meredith Laura Lynn, Kahlil Robert Irving, Suzanne Jackson, Mary Laube, Annabeth Marks, Rosemary Mayer, Althea Murphy-Price, Betye Saar, and Faith Wilding
18 at Janice Charach Gallery
18: A collection of abstract artworks
January 15 - March 1, 2023
Excerpt from Janice Charach Gallery:
“Meanings Behind the Number 18
Kabbala #18: Center of the Earth
(balance between opposing forces)
Jewish Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings meant to explain the relationship between the unchanging, eternal God—the mysterious Ein Sof (אֵין סוֹף, "The Infinite")—and the mortal,
finite universe (God's creation). It forms the foundation of mystical religious interpretations within Judaism.
For Jews the world over, the number 18 has long enjoyed a special status.
In Jewish liturgy, the prayer known as the Amidah is also called the “Shmoneh Esreh” (“the 18”), referring to the number of separate blessings that originally comprised the prayer. In the Jewish numerological tradition of gematria, the number 18 has long been viewed as corresponding to the Hebrew word “chai,” meaning “alive” (derived by adding the eighth and 10th letters of the Hebrew alphabet, chet and yud).
Anyone who has written a check on the occasion of a Jewish simcha using a multiple of $18 knows that the number is synonymous with “Mazel Tov!””
Participating artists:
8 at Laney Contemporary
November 4 - January 4 2022
Excerpt from Laney Contemporary:
“Laney Contemporary is pleased to present 8, a group exhibition guest-curated by The Fuel and Lumber Company. This special selection of diverse artists presents no singular voice, but rather a chorus of works by female-identifying artists. In a challenging contemporary moment, with a post-Roe v. Wade reality, the curatorial initiative, The Fuel and Lumber Company takes a broad philosophical, even poetic, approach to curating, placing works next to one another without didactics, but as a way to encourage dialog amongst images and between viewers. Art opens doors by posing questions rather than determining answers and 8 opens up unlimited questions about complexities of identity and control of bodies. The artists were chosen for their distinct visual voices, engaging in cross-cultural dialog, but also for their unexpectedly united harmony.
The number 8, itself a visual symbol of infinity, suggests an array of meanings including the flow of power, a source of good energy, and a strong sense of overcoming. Turned on its side, 8 symbolizes limitlessness, which in the context of this show may remind us of the immeasurable capacity of what art can accomplish and what creative people united can realize. It also suggests the unlimited and undefined possibilities of meanings that can be produced by viewer-participants in dialog with one another.”
Shadowbox, 14”x11”, acrylic on panel, 2018
Participating artists include:
Allison Grant, Alicia Henry, Fawn Krieger, Melora Kuhn, Sarah Lasley, Mary Laube, Katarina Riesing, Las Hermanas Iglesias
A Plot Hatched By Two
Curated by Robyn Graham, Warbling Collective
23 - 27 February 2022
1 - 3 Yorkton Street, London, E2 8NH, United Kingdom
Small exchanges in conversation, shared contemplation. Quietly following, trusting that something else will arrive en route, along the journey, fragments arise to plot a new direction. The emergence of a joint thought and the release of two energies.
“Desire, when reciprocal, is a plot, hatched by two, in the face of, or in defiance of, all the other plots which determine the world. It is a conspiracy of two.” - John Berger, Another Side of Desire
Participating artists are Sophie Birch, Sayan Chanda, Yun Ling Chen, Alfredo Cristiano, Oliver Guyon, Mariella Hall, Aimée Henderson, Maxine Keenan, Jörg Kratz, Mary Laube, Graham Lister, Gerald Mak, Richard Matthews, Ed Oaks, Matthew Richardson, Wade Schuster, Bryce Speed, Mark Stebbins, Erika Trotzig and Harry Whitelock
—Warbling Collective
Correspondence Archive with Donté K. Hayes
Check out my recent conversation with ceramicist Donté K. Hayes, where we discuss our interest in vessels, the color black, and speaking with our respective ancestors.
Correspondence Archive is an ongoing collection of written conversations/interviews between racialized artists talking about each other’s work and careers. Our priority is to center the voices and practices of those who have been traditionally marginalized by the art world. Collectively, these conversations will become a way to share and archive a diverse and nuanced range of ideas and individual practices from communities that have often been flattened or erased.
Correspondence Archive is organized by Alex Paik.
Donté K. Hayes, Flow, 2021, Ceramic stoneware (black clay body), 8 x 8 x 9 inches
Mary Laube, Container for the Seven Stars of the North, 2021, acrylic on panel, 20”x20”
Global Asias
Lecture at the Knoxville Museum of Art in celebration of the exhibition Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art
Songs for the Sun and Moon: Sitting with Ghosts
Please join me on Saturday October 9th 3-6pm for the closing of Songs for the Sun and Moon at Ortega y Gasset Projects. Q&A will begin at 3:30pm.
Curated by Eric Hibit
Catalog designed by Space Sisters Press
Essay by Sarah Fritchey
Songs for the Sun and Moon
My solo-exhibition is opening September 11th @ Ortega y Gasset Projects. The closing reception will feature the release of an exhibition catalog published by Space Sisters with essay by Sarah Fritchey and forward by curator Eric Hibit. Hope to see you there!
Press Release:
Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present SONGS FOR THE SUN AND MOON, a solo exhibition by Knoxville-based painter Mary Laube. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, September 11, 4-8pm. Laube is the recipient of OyG Projects 2021 Open Call for the main exhibition space. This exhibition is curated by OyG co-director Eric Hibit. 4
Working in a visual language of geometry and decorative motifs, Laube examines personal and cultural history in the context of Korean aesthetic traditions. The works in this exhibition stem from Laube’s 2019 trip to Korea (her first time there since arriving in the US at age two), where she encountered museum artifacts, architecture, or objects related to historic preservation. Under the artist’s gaze, these objects are rendered as iconic, symmetrical forms that create a stabilizing visual experience. Upon closer inspection, Laube’s paintings open up surprising ambiguities. Forms move in and out of recognizability. Drop shadows (remnants of the museum lighting under which the subject was originally viewed) sometimes morph into the subject itself. Negative space recedes in one part of the composition, only to gain the positive role somewhere else. A pattern repeat is fully visible in some areas, but interrupted in others. These formal ambiguities originates in Laube’s particular way of looking, as she describes:
While inanimate objects are not deemed living, they carry a kind of autonomy created by our socialization with them. Worn objects for example have the ability to hover between the living and the non-living world, producing an uncanny presence when separated from the body. A sweater belonging to a loved one functions as a soft vessel that takes on the shape of its contents or alternatively, various shapes of vacancy. Objects from our childhood exude a presence or meaning not intrinsic to itself but developed overtime from our unique history with it. The forms in my work are repositories that contain and transport our ever-evolving experiences layered with distant memories and romanticized projections. Surfaces, patterns, and textures allude to various artifacts, with undefined contexts and functions. Through viewers’ interpretations, the work can continue to adopt a multitude of transforming meanings.
The notion of absence - and longing - is addressed in Laube’s process, which she thinks of as a “conversation” with her ancestors. Laube is interested in metaphorical possibilities of Korean shamanism: an indigenous practice with a rich history in origin mythologies. In context of her evolving understanding of shamanism, Laube views her continued painting practice as its metaphor: a bridge between her contemporary American identity and her Korean heritage. In this way, she imbues hard-edged edged painting with a fresh poetic resonance, filled with personal meanings.
Curator Sarah Fritchey is writing an essay for a catalogue for the exhibition, to be released at a closing reception.
Mary Laube (born Seoul, Korea, 1985) is Assistant Professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her MFA (2012) from The University of Iowa, and her BFA (2009) from Illinois State University. Past exhibitions include VCU Qatar (Doha), Monaco (St Louis), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NYC), The Spring Break Art Show (NYC), and Coop Gallery (Nashville). Artist residencies include Yaddo, Wassaic Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Stiwdeo Maelor in Corris, Wales. Past publications include Art Maze Mag, Maake Magazine, and New American Paintings. In 2019, Mary received the Contemporary Visual Art Bronze Award from AHL Foundation. She is a co-founder of the Warp Whistle Project, a collaborative duo with composer Paul Schuette. Together, they make work that merges kinetic stage sets with music performance.
For more information, contact Eric Hibit at erichibit@gmail.com.
Ortega y Gasset Projects
363 3rd Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11385
Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 1-6pm
oygprojects.com / IG: @oygprojects
Mary Laube, Constellation, 2021, acrylic on panel, 16 x 20”
Two Birds One Stone: Teaching Contemporary Practices in Introductory Studio Courses
In 1815, a cataclysmic volcano erupted on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia.
Researchers have found the disaster of Mount Tambora to be the cause of monumental weather conditions across the globe. The weather shift is speculated to have caused a number of surprising consequences, such as food shortages, migration in North America, agricultural ruin leading to Chinese opioid production, and even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Bragg, Citation2016). While the work we do as teachers is microscopic compared to the effects of Mount Tambora (and also hopefully much more encouraging), the anecdote is useful for recognizing how the effects of teaching stretch beyond our targeted learning objectives. This article presents an example of how to broaden our reach as educators…
The World is Our Idea
“Laube observes that something her and Ikeda’s work have in common is that, while human form is absent from their pictures, a human presence is always strongly implied. Ikeda’s photographs allow things within the frame to go out of focus, lending a subjective and improvised feeling to her images. Rather than a neutral depiction, Ikeda offers a the sense of the kind of close and personalized looking that life’s quieter moments allow for. Laube’s objects have a similar mood, they feel as if they’re partly remembered and partly created by the associated acts of thinking and looking.”
