Presence and absence artist statement - Essay Example

However this duality in the nature does not imply an absence of harmony. Embedding the impressions of presence and absence, my creations stand at the culmination of the Environment, the Viewer and the Artwork. “It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment, the only people who don’t have an environment are dead” said Carl Andre1, the American minimalist artist. Building up on this proposition, my creations embrace three elements of the environment – Atmospheric(s), Nature and the Response.

Atomospheric(s) are installations that engender an ambience within the viewer’s perception; Nature is the surrounding environment that supports and informs the artwork; and the Response are ways of knowing how the audience reacts to my work. The second piece, the Viewer is a central participant in my works. Art brings out feelings and emotions in the viewer that transcend him/her to his/her own experiences by arousing nostalgia or connections with the past. These nostalgic feelings range from a beautiful landscape to even a television program.

Expending these nostalgic moments, I attempt to create a sensational view of everyday life with my installations. The nature of Nostalgia has intrigued many artists and intellectuals in the past. Roberta Rubenstein called Nostalgia as something that “never actually existed, or never could have existed, in the form in which it is ‘remembered’” while photographer Hollis Frampton connected nostalgia with identity and culture formation2. Finally, the third piece of my creation is the artwork itself, a channel to connect the other two (environment and the viewer).

In this exhibition I present a sculptural video installation that includes the nostalgic association to the contemporary notion of an urban place and a corresponding sculpture piece that is made of soil and plant, mirroring the idea of nostalgic discrepancy between the natural setting and a still inescapable urban context in which it is installed. Nostalgic discrepancy suggests presence and absence. The impressions of portraying presence and absence in art can be extensively seen in works of artists such as Sooja Kim, Olafur Eliasson, Popolotti Rist and Jaye Rhee, who have deeply inspired my style.

Sooja Kim examines the balance between presence and absence through her performance of harmonized settings between nature and herself. Likewise, I am using nature and its movement as stimulus elements to balance between presence and absence of the nostalgic notion of people’s ideas of nature and urban landscape of places. Swiss artist Popolotti Rist liberally uses atmospheric installations in his artwork to arouse viewer’s emotions. At his exhibition at Moma, he cultivated a lounge-like atmosphere covering the floor with chocolate color carpet, a donut shaped sofa in the center of the room and accompanying music.

Pour Your Body was a relaxingly inviting video installation. However, unlike Popolotti Rist’s work, I invite the viewer to respond to their feelings in a much more guided way. My projection strengthens the sense of enforcement and the individual loss that we encounter from nature’s needs. Perhaps my intention is closer to Olafur Eliasson’s creations in Multiple shadow house. His work explores boundaries between inside and outside, experimenting by positioning the viewer in his