>>PREVIEW
DWELLING ALONG
Runs until March 31
Evan Broens and Hye-Seung Jung
TRUCK Gallery
Look up, look way up, into the top spaces of the gallery, above the pipes and in the air that plays around those silvery threads of fishing line, and into the higher reaches of the imagination. The three new sculptural works by Evan Broens and Hye-Seung Jung levitate into the places they suggest – real places, but also imaginary places, scenarios that might play out as the objects are approached.
TRUCK's installations have been consistently well constructed this season. The group shows that have been favoured by TRUCK's programming committee as of late have offered the gallery more leeway in the choice of how the works are presented. Dwelling Along is no exception. The gallery has been painted a striking olive-grey that allows the walls to practically drop out of sight while the works remain to magnetize the energy of the space.
Hye-Seung Jung's Chebudong Project combines a wall of framed drawings with a map set atop an IKEA table (an artist's answer to prêt-a-porter exhibition display?), the two of which are connected by a fishing line. The visual impact of tracing the lines from table to wall, where they're strung up to the flawless perspective drawings, comes from following these back and forth from wall to table. However, the weight and intimacy of this tracing gesture dissipates quickly when the map fails to hold interest. The clean, structured lines of Dwelling Along’s objects function for both their esthetic qualities and their abilities to convey narratives and stories, but fall apart with the introduction of Jung's use of handwritten text and a Google map to mark the places that she has drawn. It's too literal, leaving little room to manoeuvre these places.
Evan Broens's Box, broom and chute combines these three objects into a makeshift flying balloon that references an English nursery rhyme about an old woman who takes to the sky with the intent of cleaning clouds with her broom. The scale of this object is of the Alice In Wonderland-variety: an awkwardly small basket for passengers, a gigantic broom topped with willow branches and a canvas balloon that may (or may not) have what it takes to lift off.
Mid-space, his tidy fence enclosure is just a little too high to peek over on tiptoes – it protects and conceals because the fence seals in on itself. It's tidy because it looks like it could be a piece of furniture – finished wood, with clean, deliberate edges, something semi-functional yet confounding. What does this fence do? What is inside and what is outside, how do I get in there, how do I know what's in there? The structure jogs my imagination for a guessing game to try and divine what's concealed by the fence. Peering into a few wee knotholes answers these questions, but their subtlety is in danger of going unnoticed. The answer repeats Box, broom, and chute's pairing of a manufactured wood product with a natural one, as paper airplanes are held up by a forest of thin, sharpened sticks.
As both artists have recently graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) and the University of Calgary, respectively, it's tempting to look for clues of their alma mater repeated in their works. A few threads appear. Broen's Fencing Planes loosely recalls ACAD-staple and prominent sculptor Walter May, whose recent works using wood and found-materials also manipulate familiar objects to produce multiple stories. Jung's controlled architectural drawings smack of Eric Cameron's obsessive planning sketches, and his penchant for meticulous perspective studies.
Dwelling Along doesn't seem to be about the tension between nostalgia and irony, as the exhibition text suggests. Instead, the works speak more strongly about place (or placelessness), questions of home and how we inhabit our architectures and environments. This can happen in the imagination, or in the memory, as all three of these works allude to.
I don't find the show particularly ironic. This group of sculptures provokes associations – the balloon threads, high fence and transition from map to drawings speak to the ability that art has to transport us conceptually from one place to another. I suppose that a balloon made to lift a wooden box hosting one or two people hoping to make an escape, or catch a bird’s-eye view, does seem a little bit far-fetched – but it’s within the realm of possibility. Particularly when lifted by the powers of imagination. |
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