About the Project Artists have expanded the discourse of space and time as they have sought to engage with environments. This move questions not only forms of art, but expands the notion of art and the art experience. In this show, each artist focuses on site and mind specificity though locality, mapping, body, situating, and positioning. My motivation for organizing this project is to explore what defines our memory and identity as individuals when our bodies go through cultural, locational, and physical changes. The chosen artists are exploring site-specific positioning in the form of fictional journeys and/or territorial gestures. The invited artists are Rui Sasaki, Masako Onodera, Motoko Furuhashi, Michael Collins, Liliya Lifanova, and Stephen Cartwright. The purpose of the exhibition is to bring greater awareness to people about our cultural specificity and locality, which has a unique diversity due to its position as a college town that draws international students and visitors. Another goal is to encourage people to think about what defines us as individuals using art works that focus on cultural specificity, locality, nostalgic gestures, and the body as site. Through daily-based art experiences or by creating fictional objects or situations, the artist participants articulate their different approaches to understanding their identity.
|  Liliya Lifanova, Project Flying Carpet, CeRCCa (Center for Research and Creativity Casamarlés), Lorrenç del Penedés, April 2011 |
About Curating I consider the job of a curator as one who is involved in actively seeing and listening to art works during the process of art-making, and not only as one who introduces the works after they are completed and have left the artists' hands. Traditionally, a curator is considered a host and artists are the guests of the curator. In this role, a curator is supposed to suggest a specific direction of understanding the art towards forming discourses. As such, the curator functions as an eye that leads the view. In contrast to the curatorial role, the artist's in Indra's Net suggest a more interesting journey, one of "netting" between the projects. In this framework I consider myself to be the guest or tracker who is invited to the artist's project to add rhythm, noise, or texture. The title, Indra's Net, is after the mythological character Indra of the Buddhist story (the origin of the character came from Hindu), who uses a net as one of his signature tools. The net is considered a symbol of interconnectedness, and at every vertex there is a jewel and the jewels reflect images of each other. In Korean this net is called jae-mang, and people use this word to describe the unlimited and timeless relationship of everything in the world as denoted by the structure of the net and the reflections of the jewels. I chose this title because I wanted to be a "vertex" connecting these artists that have different relationships with history and with myself. I have been watching their projects and am fascinated by their ideas and attitudes, and by how I reflect myself in their works in order to understand my own interest in the work. Instead of only showing one project in the exhibition space, I decided to introduce the process of the artists' methodologies through interviews published on the Internet. I consider this necessary because I cannot and should not delineate the starting and ending points of their projects. By showing the process of the each project, I invite audiences to join me in the journey toward the artists’ future projects. |  Untitled, hammer sank pewter, 2011, Photo by Motoko Furuhashi This exhibition was planned to further understand how an artist can approach mind/body relationships in art. Instead of struggling with the dogmatic art definitions of site specificity, the artists allowed their works the intimacy and vibration of being a living thing. Like a jewel in Indra's net, these works show how everything exists through the process of reflection. My role has been to pull on the topological net to create a vertex in front of the viewer. 09/05/2011 Yun Jeong Hong |
