Review for Espace Magazine: "Do Ho Suh: Passage/s"

Espace Magazine: Frissons Shivers, No. 117, Fall 2017

Published in Espace Magazine #117, Fall 2017

Disputing Le Corbusier’s assertion that a house is merely a “machine for living in”, 20th century designer and architect Eileen Gray posited that a house should rather be viewed as “the shell of a man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation”. While Gray passed away in 1976, her sentiment is still relevant in our increasingly globalized world. It is echoed in the premise of Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s Passage/s on view at the Victoria Miro gallery (1 February to 18 March 2017). The show marks the first exhibition of the artist’s work in London since Staircase III was presented at Tate Modern in 2011. It also constitutes the most comprehensive display of Suh’s oeuvre since his retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in 2002. 

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Review for Espace Magazine: "Michael Joo: Radiohalo"

Espace Magazine: Fetiches/Fetishes, No. 113, Spring/Summer 2016

Published in Espace Magazine #113, Spring/Summer 2016

Blain Southern Gallery, London

10 February 2016 – 9 April 2016

A white slab of marble towers over visitors as they enter the gallery. Flanked within a three-meter-high steel frame, the mammoth stone vacillates between taciturn menace and security, as it incites viewers to consider their own corporeal awareness. A meandering vein slices through the boulder, symbolising Cameron’s Line, a tectonic boundary defined by a subterranean belt of marble that runs from Connecticut to the Bronx. Oozing art historical references, Michael Joo’s work speaks of the geometric impulses and minimalist ideologies of the 1960s, of Joseph Beuys’ articulation of primal and elemental forces, of Gary Kuehn’s emphasis on the physicality of raw mediums, of Richard Serra’s sculptures that teeter on the brink of danger, and of Barry Le Va’s conceptual installations. Yet, Joo’s engagement with independent themes and the transformative qualities of matter lend his practice a unique position within the context of contemporary art. This sculpture, fittingly entitled Prologue (Montclair Danby Vein Cut) (2014-2015), acts as a preamble to the exhibition. Echoing the nucleus of the artist’s iconography, it sets the stage for Joo’sRadiohalo show at Blain Southern in London.

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Review for Espace Magazine: "Robert Therrien: Reinventing the Readymade"

Espace Magazine: Migrations Frontieres/Migrations Borders, No. 111, Autumn 2015

Published in Espace Magazine #111, Autumn 2015

Gagosian Gallery, London

14 April – 30 May 2015

Presenting visitors with a portal into a fantastical world where the uncanny rubs shoulders with the familiar, Robert Therrien’s oversized objects displayed at the Gagosian Gallery in London from 14 April to 30 May 2015 speak of childhood curiosity. The colossal sculptures are a bid, if you will, to preserve the fleeting days of innocence through the ribbons of whimsical narrative that run through the exhibition. The exaggerated dimensions of the everyday housewares depicted punctuate the rigid white cube, as the space transforms and transcends into the absurd. Hence, it is difficult to walk through the gallery and not feel transported back to a simpler time. Akin to the artist’s earlier works, the oeuvres exhibited dissolve the boundaries that exist between dreams and childhood memories; Therrien depicts humdrum objects that each viewer is sure to have encountered in their past, objects that we can only revisit through a hypnagogic exploration. Thus, his installations simultaneously evoke the wide-eyed idealism and trepidation of youth. It is this guileless awe that beckons within us the sensation of being little again. I find myself unwittingly reminiscing about Lewis Carroll and his Alice, who when faced with the little door she was too big to fit through drank the shrinking potion. Much like Alice in Wonderland, visitors fall down the rabbit hole when confronted with the inevitable perception shift that occurs upon encountering Therrien’s rounded artworks.

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Review for Espace Magazine: "Rachel Kneebone: 399 Days"

Espace Magazine: Diorama, No. 109, Winter 2015

Published in Espace Magazine, #109, Winter 2015

White Cube, Bermondsey, London

18 July - 28 September 2014

Hybrid body parts, severed limbs and phallic figures populate Rachel Kneebone’s 399 Days (2012-2013). Towering over visitors as they enter the White Cube’s 9x9x9 gallery space in Bermondsey (London, UK), the artist’s psychosexual hinterland takes the form of an erect column that soars towards the cubic room’s bright skylight. Unfolding an infinite spiral narrative that purposefully lacks a cohesive beginning, middle and end, the ivory sculpture refutes both history and the passage of time. Instead, it chooses to focus on the now, or rather the viewer’s immediate visceral reaction to the anagrams of vehemence and violence that inhabit Kneebone’s porcelain chrysalis. Hence, recognizable shapes rub shoulders with the quintessentially bizarre, as 399 Days simultaneously conveys familiarity and strangeness, beauty and horror, purity and adulteration, ecstasy and mortality, fragility and monumentality, playfulness and menace, and completeness and provisionality. It is through these acts of negation that the artist’s uncanny plot unfolds.

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