Quotidian – Documenting Everyday Life
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/46447082[/vimeo]
Ji Sun Lee’s 2nd Solo Show
Quotidian – Documenting Everyday Life
07. 13. 2012 – 08. 10. 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, July 13, 8pm – 10pm
Artist Talk: Friday, August 3, 6pm
Gallery Hours: Thursday, Friday, 6pm – 10pm and by appointment
MediaNoche Gallery
1355 Park Ave. corner store
New York NY 10029
646.228.7950
www.medianoche.us
The daily occurrences of city living are selectively captured then dynamically rendered through a prism of color and sound. Artist Ji Sun Lee codifies her daily, routine activities as a way of visualizing and gaining insight into the greater, total event of her life. The people, places, things, and processes that cumulatively define who she is are unique occurrences but they are also common experiences shared by everyone.
This urban study is a recombinant examination of the global DNA that keeps the human organism concentrated in blocks of activity that are specific to the locale yet universal in addressing its needs. Six works depict and comment on how we live: Commuting, Shopping, Eating, Dressing, Residing, and Sharing. Lee succeeds in transforming the trivia of daily life into major signifiers.
Commuting
Shopping
Eating
Deressing
Residing
Sharing
Emblematic of the entire exhibition are the bus rides in Seoul and New York, presented as parallel experiences in which the images are each an abstract movement of color bound to the ambient sound within the buses. The tension between the abstract and the real offers a digital koan so typical of Ji Sun Lee’s work: “My daily life in Seoul and the time I spent in New York are memories that are selections by their very nature.
Recollecting and reconstituting them as visual code creates a meta-level of remembrance that is similar to information graphics but different in representing a micro view of personal data that leads to a macro view of life.”
Ji Sun Lee maps the minutiae of contemporary life into patterns that emerge from the seemingly random and arbitrary. In the process the artist distills the essential, suggesting that while insignificant on an individual level, on a group or mass scale the impact of our activities are great and have vast implications not least of which are the aesthetics tooled here. Riding the New York City M5 bus in 2007 is Ji Sun Lee’s original source of inspiration.
