This month’s edition features a variety of emerging talent, mixed media, and galleries that have traversed various models ranging from pop up, to residency, to one-weekend extravaganzas. It was also a treat to learn from these artists and curators. Their visions range from capturing the future of their medium and a long career ahead, to a retrospective that charts historical trends and asserts important themes about our society writ-large. While a flurry of fairs, events, parties, and afters begin to take shape in the fall-winter calendar, these shows coax in a season rife with flavor and excitement for the blustery (but creatively stimulating) months to come.
Tina Kim: There is no place (October 3 – November 2)
Transport yourself into the misty, moody world of artist Kibong Rhee at his solo show with Tina Kim. Key themes in Rhee’s work, including water as an embodiment of the fleetingness of life and observation of the world as “inherently either blurry or chaotic” as he shares, are illustrated in fine detail. Dimly lit trees in shades of glistening, dewy emerald (Connectives- B, Connectives – C) stand alongside a range of graceful, gray tableaus of vegetation, almost photographic in quality. Rhee’s work often evokes a dreamlike serenity, where nature is at once tranquil and otherworldly. His use of transparent fabric and subtleties creates a feeling of depth and suspension that you can almost hear– the wash of morning rain outside one’s window, the soft rustling of branches in a deluge – as though each scene exists in a delicate balance between the seen and unseen. In this immersive experience, viewers are invited to lose themselves in a meditative exploration of nature’s ephemeral beauty, as Rhee masterfully layers textures, and invites the viewer into a quiet, introspective space where the boundaries of the physical world blur into something more ethereal.
—Sam Falb