Exhibition Information

(출처= 닻미술관)

(출처= 닻미술관)

(출처= 닻미술관)

(출처= 닻미술관)

			Online exhibition link: https://www.datzmuseum.org/ontheboundary_online 


Datz Museum of Art presents a new summer exhibition <On the Boundary> featuring photographer Young Suh and poet Katie Peterson. <On the Boundary> is the second exhibition held under the theme 'Place and Space'. Moving on from <Home-Joo, Myung Duck>, we leave our place of home and embark on a journey of material and spiritual transformation. On this journey, we question the essence of life on a road that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes precarious. Young Suh and Katie Peterson draw out a storyline of existing on the boundaries of life through photos, texts, videos, and books, recreating a space that asks the fundamental question of 'Can we live here?'

 



Can we live here?

 

These images, films, and books all present, in intersecting forms, fragments of narrative. Considered together, the work forms a many-stranded creation myth centered in a single existential question, “Can we live here?” This question revises the traditional existential question, “What is the meaning of life?” We ask instead whether living on Earth is possible, especially with our world’s changing, and challenging conditions of climate and culture.

 

Our physical context for this question is the American West, with its dramatic landscapes and weather. Our work also treats California’s Central Valley and remote islands off the West Coast of Ireland. Images ask the viewer to encounter the dry heat of the high Mojave in Eastern California and the frigid winter of Alaska. Portraits in those landscapes show the effect of those conditions on individuals, centering human vulnerability.

 

A religious dimension animates our question: this is a spiritual narrative. The traditional Christian metaphor for life is the journey; we refigure that as the American road trip, less lofty and more messy than a formal pilgrimage. A lyric from a classic bluegrass song puts it well: “And I can’t feel at home / in this world anymore.” Living inside a feeling of homelessness, and accepting that fact, feels crucial to us, and true to our conditions. Images frame their subjects in moments of impasse, rather than engaged in transit – a young man leans back in a trailer into a beam of harsh desert light, a woman with an uncertain look on her face floats in a luminous pool, a boy holds a birthday cake in a remote desert valley. Narrative questions then float to the surface. Each portrait inspires a kind of devotional worrying, a wondering about the conditions of the subject and the nature of their life. Family portraits intensify the struggle – grouped in forests, diverse families seem aware, alive, endangered, and vulnerable.

 

We want the work to be both personal and symbolic – we are interested in how people process and make meaning, how larger questions lodge themselves in small, human-scale lives and events. We aim for a mood that combines a kind of emotional intimacy with symbolic thinking. We wanted to make books because they combine text and image in an intimate setting, giving a reader a quiet, meditative task – each of the nine books tells a story that begins in an awareness of place, of landscape, of the natural world.

 

Young Suh, Katie Peterson


(Source= datz museum of art)