Exhibition Review: Jinie Park, “Reap/Sow”
I was standing on a subway platform during a day trip to New York sometime in May and noticed an advertisement for the Frieze art fair. On the advertisement was a drawing by Alexander Calder. I have to admit my own ignorance when it comes to the artist’s drawings and was surprised to see the aftermath of pigments making their circuitous journey through a dollop of water. Although it was probably a detail shot of a larger drawing, something about this haphazard, watery image next to the largest underground reminder of New York’s grid system reminded me of artist Jinie Park's recent solo show at Hamilton Gallery, “Reap/Sow.” On a wall in the back of the gallery hung four medium sized paintings and two smaller works. Each painting had a gridded structure that was the result of sewing together pieces of fabric and displaying the traditionally unexposed side (think of the inside of a pair of jeans). In and around the confines of these grids were washes of muted red’s, yellows, blues, sometimes flesh tones or earth tones, sometimes a result of dirty water being soaked up by fabric.
My first reading of the work is associative. The exposed inner seams of the paintings remind me of the hidden valleys of our own clothing, complete with stains indexing a host of emotional (and other) outbursts buried under layers of bleach. Here I think of the title “Reap/Sow.” Most of us avoid our own emotional history like Wilde’s Dorian Grey avoiding his own corroding portrait. To do so is laborious and means looking at our own emotional scatology. I think of this when I see the corporeal seams in Jinie Park’s paintings acting as weak containers for wherever those stains might decide to travel. I don’t need to know the emotional backstory here but I trust that the artist does. She knows that refusing to look at something does not mean it’s not there.
My second reading of the work came after reading the press release. Park describes her daily commute from Baltimore to Glen Arden being a jumping off point for this series. I think of the highway, grids, road rage, radio music, flora/fauna, and I’m reminded of Robbe-Grillet’s “Jealousy” - His compartmentalization of the emotional and the architectural. The commute is a routine where these things often spill into one another. It is a relatively fixed transportational structure. We can choose one of three routes and depending on time of day, we know how traffic will dictate our arrival time. Yet, our emotional response to this situation may differ greatly within the confines of the automobile speeding along the highway system. It’s no surprise that the car crash is so often used as a metaphorical device. But the emotional landscape remains unseen. Its inner workings are harder to analyze than its terrestrial counterpart. I don’t think Jinie Park’s paintings are attempting to analyze these parallel phenomena as much as they act to document and observe it.
Jinie Park, “Reap/Sow,” at Hamilton Gallery, Baltimore, MD through May 29, 2016 - http://hamiltonarts.org
andulkaphoto
titsay
amandla
gummygunk