Posted on June 10: Museum of Art presents new summer exhibits
[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Flotillaeight.jpg” caption=”Flotilla #8 2002″]A sound and sensory exhibit and geometrical interpretations of nature are the focus of two new exhibits opening at the McMaster Museum of Art.
The Museum presents Flotilla, by artist Erika James, and My Mother Tongue, by Lee MyungSook, from June 13 to Aug. 22. There will be a public reception for both exhibits on June 24 from 7 to 9 p.m.
Flotilla is the first in a series of exhibitions by contemporary artists who submitted proposals to the Museum's call for submissions last fall.
Curated by Alexandra Pierce, acting director of the museum, the exhibit presents a sound and sensory experience with objects that shape an “unnatural” environment or landscape. With an installation of floating, breathing, murmuring organic sculptures that pulse with light, James challenges traditional perceptions of landscape in art.
James is a Toronto-based artist and graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver. Her hand cast plastic sculptures are made with additions of casting rubber, latex, fibreglass cloth, and a variety of dried beans. They are suggestive of underwater creatures, prehistoric organisms, or even primitive giant fruit pods. Presented together in a darkened gallery, with interactive sounds and dimly flashing lights, these works create a strange environment that is both enchanting and disconcerting.
Richard Butler, professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University, provides an interpretive text for this exhibition.
“Flotilla,” says Butler, “is more than an exhibition of contemporary sculpture crafted with contemporary materials it is a biological dij` vu, an evanescent thread of genetic memory tying us through more than five hundred and thirty-five thousand millennia to our origins in the very dim and distant past. It is a glimpse of another world, one that might have existed save for the beat of a butterfly's wing.”
My Mother Tongue includes large-scale, vibrant paintings by Korean-born, Mississauga-based Lee MyungSook. This artist gives a first impression of purely formal and geometric abstraction, but at closer examination, the work reveals its source in nature and human form — trees and leaves emerge from the shapes, colour evokes emotions. The artist realizes her stated intent to interpret human experience through the geometrical interpretation of nature.
MyungSook studied art and obtained her masters in art education at KyungHee University, Seoul, Korea in the 1970s. It was there that she was first exposed to minimalism and abstract expressionism. She has an extensive exhibition history in Korea as well as in the Toronto area, where she moved in 2000. My Mother Tongue includes 27 of her recent paintings.
An excerpt from Lee MyungSook and the Appropriation of Geometry by McMaster's Miroslav Lovric, associate professor of mathematics and statistics and Rivka Birkan, visual artist and student in McMaster University's arts & science program, reads: “Modernist battle of Man against Machine or man exploring and conquering his Id seem passi; however, relationships among people, between a person and God or the absence of God, and between a person and her rapidly evolving environment are universal, and the struggles are eternal. Questioning human values and scientific truth, Lee is confronted with the same challenges of determining what comprises human reality and of expressing universal and unifying experiences. Like her modernist predecessors, Lee finds that more can be expressed and implied through geometry than can be illustrated through figuration and direct representation.”
The McMaster Museum of Art is located on the campus of McMaster University at the corner of Sterling Street and University Avenue. Admission to the Museum and this special presentation is pay-what-you-can with a suggested donation of $2. Students, seniors and members are free. Museum Hours: Tuesday – Friday 11-5; Sunday 12-5. Phone: 905-525-9140 ext. 23081. Fax: 905-527-4548. E-mail: museum@mcmaster.ca. Web site: www.mcmaster.ca/museum
Photo caption: Flotilla #8 2002, plastic, copper wire, 8″ x 3' x 8″. Photo: courtesy of the artist
