ART CITIES:Athens-Pillow Swallow Hollow Yellow

In the group exhibition “Pillow-Swallow-Hollow-Yellow” five young artists deal with a variety of issues including the human body, the influence of the current online or offline media condition the physical and digital, the experience of migration, of cultural uprooting and disorientation of identity, inner experiences and physical reality resulting in a temporary archive, landscapes linking infrastructure and individuals through video, performance and objects.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: ARTWALL Project Space

Five artists of diverse cultural backgrounds and different artistic origins and expressive mediums: Ismene King, Jiyoung Yoo, Yarli Allison, Hiroko Nakajima and Eom Jeongwon are recent graduates of the London Slade School of Fine Art. Through making of objects, video/Performance and Text her work, Ismene King explores the visceral, the merging of surfaces/layers and the merging of meanings. A state of possibility. A system of capillaries and bone emerging through translucent skin, a rubbery surface, a glitch in familiarity. An inanimate object, dead or artificial. Jiyoung Yoo’s work portrays the landscape of today where random images she encountered from her ‘off-line’ life in cities and from her ‘on-line’ life commingle. She has been collecting content she liked or retweeted from the social media and using it as her material bank as she is interested in the clash between appropriated images and her autonomy as an artist who select and arrange them. With a reflection on the influence of current media condition, Jiyoung focuses on the dissonance of components in her work by combining imagery and material taken from high and popular cultural contexts and from the physical and digital. Yarli Allison in her work explores psychological and emotional conditions with a primary focus on distant states of displacement, disconnection, and detachment. Her past experience of migration between Hong Kong and Canada, the absence of caretakers, and cultural uprooting contributed to the disorientation of identity formation. In the working process, she relies heavily on physical strength and long durations of repetitive manipulation of materials as an attempt to re-live between states of dissociation and reality. Hiroko Nakajima is interested in how materials, colour, surface and form translate our inner experience into a physical reality. The transformation is often a journey of uncovering the experience, ‘processing the unprocessed’ by creating a form for a lingering experience which remained unresolved. The resulting work is a material record of a moment, each work capturing a fragment of the experience, and together they create an inner-scape. Through her practice Eom Jeongwon explores aspects of how the infrastructure shapes and designs our landscape and tries to establish a link between the infrastructure and individuals. Throughout her journey, she researches patterns of geographical and topographical conditions highlighting an unconscious influence where we overlook the presence of a space we passed by. In this show, she presents a video installation by borrowing from Google maps, and measuring her subjective matters, body, time, space, thought (possibly) through her journey to Athens.

Info: Curator: Ismene King, ARTWALL Project Space, 26 Sofokleous Street, Athens, Duration: 21/12/16-5/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fri 17:00-21:00, Sat 13:00-16:00, https://theartwall.wordpress.com