Taking Home With You
I was invited to participate in an event titled “Taking Home With You”, organized by Sang-Mi Yoo for the SGCI conference in New Orleans. This event will be on Friday, March 16th, 2012, 11:30am-4:00pm, at the Woldenberg Art Center (Tulane University) in Room 214.
Below is the project description of the event by Sang-Mi:
“New Orleans (2012 SGCI Conference location) is a city reminding us of the frequent history of natural disasters including the recent hurricane Katrina. Home is an important place for everyone as it provides us with a sense of protection and identity. Contemporary life often causes us move from one place to another as a result of many factors, including employment, family, education, war and violence, in addition to natural disasters. However, this transitory habitation may reflect how our contemporary lives are moving toward more nomadic lifestyles. The proposed panel will touch on the idea of home as well as positive thoughts on being nomadic or non-territorial. The home resides more within our minds than within the physical world.
In their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe nomadic space. In this model, one navigates the vast space through relationships between elements within the space. However, being somewhere is not restricted to being in a single place. Our body is always moving on. We are potentially at any place within the region. Everywhere becomes the place.
In this proposed event, each participating artist will bring prints of home. each print should have cutting and folding marks, allowing it to be cut and folded into a house form. the viewer is invited to visit the site, select a print, cut out the shape, fold it into a collapsible three-dimensional home and take it with them, examining the ideal notion of home and participation in a good cause. All of the proceeds from suggested donations will go to the American Red Cross to help out those affected by the recent tsunami in Japan.”
For this project, I focused on the ideas of transitory habitation and nomadic space that Sang-Mi addressed in her writing. I made a screen print with an image of a Korean high-rise apartment. It is in this kind of architectural structures that I grew up in when I lived in Korea. All of these apartments look very similar, with these pink/peach and yellow/cream color schemes. Two of the three different apartments that I grew up in, now no longer exists. They were both demolished and newer and even higher apartments were built in place of the old. When one folds and assembles this print into a three-dimensional structure, it will become a paper bag. I hope that these paper bag apartments will evoke the ideas of transience and impermanence, as well as a sense of transitory existence for the event participants.
This print is a 5 color silk screen print, printed on butcher paper. 4 color layers are printed on the front, and 1 color layer is printed on the back.
My student, Joshua Meier, assisted me with this project.
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