Line Drawing II: Impossibly Connected
Ongoing, the Artist's own hair stitched on Photographs of split and painted bricks, 12 x 18 x 1.5" each (Phots, inkjet printed on Ultra Smooth Fine Art paper by Buffalo Big Print)
In this series of work, I explore my feeling of being marginal, living between two cultural realities, trying to bridge two identities, and in so doing I explore themes of time and space and the conflict between past and future.
The two primary materials with which I am working are bricks and my shed hair. A brick, broken in half, represents a split self, two identities, the space between the past and the future. Shed hair symbolizes for me the detached self and memory loss, suggesting the weakened connection between my current self and my past self and between me and my home country.
I repeatedly hammer on the brick to create a crack and eventually split it into two pieces. After breaking the brick, I photograph it and, again, in a repetitive movement, embroider on the photograph, with my hair, lines between the two parts of the brick. Those repetitive actions visualize the concept of ourselves as the embodiments of time passing between the past and the future. One cannot connect two heavy objects such as bricks with delicate hair; that is only possible on a two-dimension rendering, a photograph, of the brick pieces. I see my line embroidering as reconnecting, symbolically and impossibly, the gap between past and future, between two identities, reconnecting the two parts of a split self. In reality, the present is continually shifting. The future becomes the past. Establishing an identity and settling into the space between past and future are profoundly difficult.
Thus, I explore the concept of time and space through the 4-dimensional process of breaking the bricks and line-stitching the photographs, the 3-dimensional bricks and embroidered hair, and the 2-dimensional photographs.
photo by Sun Young Kang and Adam Reich, courtesy of YI GALLERY
