Byoung

Los Angeles, California – June 28th

A recent solo exhibition by artist Byoung at the Peggy Phelps Gallery at Claremont College’s Graduate School of Art was a colorful and reflective theme on meditative and fine craftsmanship.  Her installation and thread drawings are exquisite counterparts to each other and strike a quiet yet fulfilling balance of material, color, and composition.

The installation, Decode 1, is a box-room plunked askew toward the back of the large gallery, inviting the viewer past the framed drawings on either side of the space.  Entering this dark box is a sensory-depriving experience. Devoid of light and the freedom to move freely, a static shroud of blackness envelops you while tantalizing triangles of ultraviolet blue, green, and red burst forth in geometric intensity. Senses gathered, you notice the arrangement: a rotated black square on the vinyl-covered floor mirroring the same square on the ceiling, opposing a black wall with a diagonal display of the super bright, black-lit triangle shapes falling from top to bottom.

The effect of standing in the intended viewing column intimates staring out from the bridge of a spacecraft into a collapsing universe violently interrupted by prisms of pigment.  Suggesting a life transport module, the column of the pitched squares is a formal and futurist situation.  Before you walk off the square, the physics and tricks of the (lack of) light and structural reference move you in a silent shift of disorientation.  The multilayered complex color chamber reverts to just four walls and about as many UV hues deftly laid out in a most deliberate and formulaic fashion.

Back in the surrounding gallery, Byoung has hung a handful of small, framed thread drawings and one large one. Obviously delicate arrangements of material and color, they insist on up-close inspection which, in turn, demands curiosity and wonder.

These regimented, compact and modular drawings are installed in an inviting lead-up to the installation in the back, like lights on a runway or stripes on a road. They are like cheering friends on either side of the street at the end of a marathon as you approach Decode I, the finish line.  They are small and only half a dozen, but they provide warmth and balance.

The seventh drawing, the largest one, called Decode 2, is an intricate array of threaded shapes and squares on a yellow field and a dark frame.  Perhaps the most formal of the works, simply because of its size, it requires less intimacy and curiosity to take it in.

Byoung accomplishes a transformation of sorts with basic raw materials becoming such wonderful little works.  The process is a kind of needlepoint on fabric (linen, in most cases) with a superfine thread and, according to her, a “tiny tiny needle.”  This work is a natural progression for someone studying alternative healing and acupuncture, as she is.

Impeccably and perfunctorily nestled in frames of African Blackwood and other exotic hardwoods, some of them sprayed with ultra-smooth layers of contrasting finish, they just seem to work without thinking too much about how they work.  The enjoyable part of taking them in easily surpasses the more daunting challenge of figuring them out.

In Untitled (Yin and Yang), two vertical strands in minimal Wenge wood frames obliquely mirror one another with their intricately woven red, black, and white geometric shapes.

Another untitled, all-yellow piece recalls social critic and dissident feminist Camille Paglia’s phrase, “There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around…”

Byoung removed all the thread she’d previously worked into the yellow material, leaving an abstracted form, a take-away weave on a mysterious surface.

Ilsebill, named after a relative of the artist who admired it so much, is a myriad of blue and maroon rectangles of stars, circles and other bits woven in similar patterns with complementary colors.  With its bright blue frame, this one is so removed from all the rest that it had its own visceral reversal on the artist, physically weakening her after having stared so much at the odd maroon hue she was not used to using while making it.

Quite notable is the fact that the artist handcrafts the frames as well.  Byoung’s steadfast concentration on the material steers the resulting work into a focus of unique and vital effort.