<Episteme>
<Episteme>
Wood, glue, nail gun, book, found objects, 2009
"...“Episteme” plays with the philosophical concept of French philosopher Michel Foucault's use of the term, showing us something that almost is what it seems to be but in fact is a maze of suggestions. The artist has constructed a stairway of sorts, rising by about a dozen steps within the small room Manifest calls its Parallel Space Gallery. The spindly construction curves upward, incorporating slim sticks as suggestions of a railing and an actual, discarded handrail standing straight up in the turn. On the plywood surface of some steps are clear pools of resin, hardened but suggesting water and the attendant dangers of slipping on wet surfaces. It's an unsettling piece, an ordinary element of our lives made unusual and distracting, depicted as fragile instead of sturdy. In her artist's statement, Hong says: “As an unfolding moment, the staircase is the memory of body experience.”
The gallery has compiled juror statements to appear in the gallery and in the catalog. One juror wrote of the “common architectural element … reinterpreted and deconstructed,” and another referred to its “calling on a language of disuse and abandon.” A mention is made of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending the Staircase” — a reference that also surfaces in the artist's statement — and also of Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Pennsylvanian home known as Fallingwater."
from Critic's Pick, by Jane Durrell
One Singular Citation
Walnut Hills gallery showcases first Manifest Prize winner and more
How do bodies stand up by themselves? How do sound and flesh hold up the body-the body as one unity, as a structure having its own permanency? My first work from the wooden sculpture series, “Episteme(2009),” has two different identities related with bodily Gestalt. The first Identity is a growing/extending floor, and the second is an unfolding moment. This structure does not have a base, inner structure to support the whole body like other practical staircases. This staircase lays between the typicality of body and space memory and the unexpected varietal monster's screaming, and creates the tension of a stage, like an actor in a play who is just about to stand up. As an unfolding moment, the staircase is the memory of body experience and, like Duchamp’s staircase, it doesn’t have a shadow since it is focuses on time, not space, and on momentum instead of substance. It has already lost all physical character and exists as a tracing from the memory of the body.
Like in Francis Bacon's painting, to break down orders and rules and invite people in-between experiences, we need a frame: the frame as a stage and the frame as a body. For this reason, the stair extends from the organism of the architectural space and stands by itself. Smashed bodies exist in the sense of exceptional beings or monsters, and their screaming encountered at the border of animalism. A scream might be the only way of escaping from the body and the cage while having the will of life or death. Through this screaming-drawing, the animalism of the subject finally appears, having escaped from the body-cage moment through howling.
- From a note of artist
<Episteme>
Wood, glue, nail gun, book, found objects, 2009
