Autumn Ahn

surfaces

DECEMBER 6, 2019 - JANUARY 7, 2020

“a lively imagination requires a balance of memory and 

forgetting. ‘You should go in for a blending of the two 

elements, memory and oblivion,’ says Jorge Luis Borges,  

‘and we call that imagination.’” 

    -Lewis Hyde,  A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (2019)

surfaces, Autumn Ahn’s first show with the gallery, brings together a selection of experimental pieces that exhibit how a performance practice builds what the complete surface could be. In the presented material landscapes from a performance artwork, Voy(age)ur (2014), alongside new sculptural objects, Tiles (2019), Ahn questions what it means to hold on to things that may already be left behind and the impact that is left on the physical plane. 

These collected artworks deal with the topographical veneer of experience.  Included in this show are four resulting fabric panels from the durational performance work, Voy(age)ur, a 10-day continuous performance that accumulated both in digital media and physical matter.  The performance built a field of reference to highlight the fractured and mythic qualities of the public vs. private persona and was an experiment in documenting our unapologetically material lives. By simultaneously playing the role of the consumer and also the mythic figure, the spectator and the artist built together a surreal world based on its conflicting dualities, the imagined and the tangible.

The new sculptural pieces, Tiles, make reference to the perennial acts of building and preservation that takes place in human societies. Forging possible architectures to remove the past in order to make way for the future, the industrialization of modern societies brutally and efficiently proposes a forward movement. This amnesiac optimism highlights what unfortunately happens to our material perspectives over time - they decay.  The tension between a fragile petal resisting the weight of the cement inspired me to consider the passing changes of our modern thought. That in spite of our industrial aims to push the past away, these tensions stay with us as reminders of a collective memory, no matter how delicate.

Our common material spaces guide us through these interludes of age, sometimes holding meaning inconsequentially. The passing moments in “live art” accumulate, reveal, hide, and erode alongside their material changes.  Their inevitable erosion presents for us some metaphysical awareness of the curtain between our daily routines and the spiritual mysteries within the contemporary memory. In these pseudo-archeological moments, we are given collisions of temporal, cultural, and historical understandings. This small congregation of pieces questions our role as both witnesses and participants in life.

Artist Statement:

In my artistic practice, I reconstruct temporal, poetic and historic implications of change. Through interdisciplinary methods and research, I work with an elastic dialogue between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and others.  These mediums uncover ornamental frameworks that we use to describe the human experience and I ask how those descriptions become histories, what we do with pretexts of hierarchy, and what systems link our longstanding relationship to the unknown.  I am particularly anchored in looking at these invisible and often intuitive systems as a vocabulary to bridge our conversations between memory and language, and also to consider the ways we renew our experiences to meaning.