Kyoung Ae Cho: One at a Time, April 13-July 13
Women, Nature, Science Series Continues
Kyoung Ae Cho: One at a Time, is the third in a series of exhibitions that examine–in various combinations and with some latitude for digression–women, nature and science. Cho will be exhibiting recent, or recently completed, work that–through painstaking collection over a long period, or the slow accretion of small objects to produce a whole–speak to the passage of time and, inevitably, mortality. The exhibition opens with a reception on Sunday, April 13, 2014 from 3 to 5 pm and remains on view through July 13, 2014. The reception is free and open to the public. The Lynden Sculpture Garden is located at 2145 West Brown Deer Road, Milwaukee, WI 53217.
Cho’s practice is never far from nature and the cycles of life: she collects fallen leaves and twigs for her hangings and closely observes the flowers and insects in her garden, recording their behavior in startling, almost voyeuristic photographs. Much of her work is created through the slow, meditative accumulation of small gestures: stitches, burn marks, pin pricks. For this exhibition, Cho, who occupies a space precariously defined by hunter-gathering, hoarding, and inspired recycling, has broadened her ongoing dialogue with nature to include pedestrian manufactured materials and traces of the body. Two works, Shining Ground (2013) and Resonance II (2014), contain mica discovered during a residency at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, but they are also riddled with scores of sewing pins that, in their varying density, create an illusionistic three-dimensional surface. Resonance I rests in the center of the gallery, its low platform with the indication of a seat strewn with gravel and wooden spheres covered in burn marks. M-a-r-k-i-n-g (2013), the largest work in the exhibition, is a series of 24 canvases that references the Korean custom of collecting one’s own hair as it is shed: each canvas represents a month of Cho’s life between April 2011 and March 2013.
Cho’s work is full of paradoxes, and is often held together by the tension between order and chaos. Grids abound in the gallery. She braids and binds stray hairs into neat rings, frames twigs in square boxes, or sews a riot of petals and leaves into a legible pattern. In Garden, a 10-foot-square quilt of manmade flowers, the unruly plant parts defy the strict geometry Cho has imposed on them–the lines as straight as the gardens at Versailles. Brashly and inescapably artificial, the quilt hangs in the porch, turning its colorful back on the muted, austere work in the gallery, and facing, instead, the still wintry grounds. It may have taken eight years for Cho to tack down the profusion of flowers, but this, we realize, is a garden that will never die. A challenge to mortality, Garden changes the tenor of the conversation between Cho’s work and the grounds outside as they transform from desolation to the profusion of midsummer.
About the Artist
Kyoung Ae Cho was born in South Korea and earned a BFA from Duksung Women’s University in Seoul. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She has taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, Cranbrook-Kingswood School, Penland School of Crafts and Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and is currently a professor in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Her work has been exhibited in national and international venues including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Raleigh, NC; Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ; San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, CA; Reading Public Museum, Reading, PA; Cheongju Craft Museum, Cheongju, South Korea; Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CO; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; National Museum of History, Taipei, Taiwan; Project Space Gallery at Montalvo, Saratoga, CA; Soma Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Honolulu; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; INOVA, Milwaukee, WI; Textilemuseum, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Wisconsin Academy, Madison, WI; Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery, Las Vegas, NV; South Bend Museum of Art, IN; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla, WA; Dairy Barn Arts Center, Athens, OH; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Evanston Art Center, IL; Carnegie Art Museum of Oxnard, CA; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kwachon, South Korea.
Cho’s work has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, among them Textile Fibre Forum (Australia); Fiberarts; Surface Design Journal; American Craft; Monthly CRART (South Korea); Fiber Art Today (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.); Masters: Art Quilts (Lark Book); Quilt National 2003: The Best of Contemporary Quilts (Lark Books); Contemporary Quilt: Quilt National 1997 (Lark Books); No: Nouvel Object (Design House, South Korea); Art & Craft (South Korea); Fiberarts Design Book IV, VI & VII (Lark Books); and Art Textiles of the World: USA (Telos Art Publishing, England), among others. She is the subject of the monograph Portfolio Collection: Kyoung Ae Cho (Telos Art Publishing, England.) Cho has also received many awards, grants and fellowships, including the Greater Milwaukee Foundation‘s Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Export Fund for Visual Art Award; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Arts and Humanities Travel Award; a Wisconsin Arts Board Award Fellowship; the UWM Foundation and Graduate School Research Award (2004); the Lillian Elliott Award; a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; and an Art on the Move Grant from the Detroit Recreation Department.
About the Lynden Sculpture Garden
The Lynden Sculpture Garden offers a unique experience of art in nature through its collection of more than 50 monumental sculptures sited across 40 acres of park, lake and woodland. The sculpture garden is open to art and nature lovers of all ages on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 am to 5 pm; and Saturdays and Sundays from 12 noon to 5 pm through May 13. Beginning May 14, we stay open until 7:30 pm on Wednesday evenings. Closed Thursdays. Admission to the sculpture garden is $9 for adults and $7 for students and seniors; children under 6 and members are free. Annual memberships are also available.
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.
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