LOTUS L. KANG

Conceived especially for this presentation, the works expands across the exhibition space, inviting visitors into intimate proximity. Lengths of unfixed industrial film— “skins” as Kang refers to them—are draped over and across raw steel tubes suspended from the ceiling. The shadowy impressions on the film create layered, visceral timescales, rendered in a palette of yellow, orange, red, purple and brown. By intentionally misusing the material, exposing it to sunlight and manipulating its exposure in both planned and unforeseen ways, the artist has invented modes of inscribing her process, turning the film into indexes of overlapping durations. The film is “tanned” ––or exposed––across multiple sites: her studio, her home, and predominantly, in a greenhouse situated in upstate New York. A structure that is not fully inside nor fully outside, the greenhouse embodies an in-between space that holds cycles of growth and decay.

Wooden pallets, mesh fabric, cardboard cut-outs, cast aluminum objects, splashes of rainwater, and the films’ own folding and touching leave the sheets with cryptic, shadowy traces, their glossy surfaces marked by experimentation and time. The reflective quality of the film mirrors the viewer and environment, offering a distorted echo of its surroundings and implicating the viewer. The raw film alludes to early photography’s purpose of documentation. However, Kang subverts such associations by deconstructing the medium, emphasizing the alchemical, embodied, and sculptural. For Kang, the unfixed and continually sensitive film resembles various membranes: cellular, plastic, textile, or synthetic. As her term “skins” suggests, the film is akin to the body’s largest organ. Worn on the outside rather than inside, it is strong and resistant yet vulnerable and absorptive. Skin is an active vessel: a connective, porous membrane where time is recorded and evidenced both legibly and illegibly. With their associations to bruise, blood or bile, the colors of the cascading film invoke the body’s fragility, resilience and leakiness.

Nearby, two tatami mats are folded and stacked, wrapped in industrial rubber, obscuring immediate recognition. Objects such as cast aluminum perilla leaves, yellow cellophane, bottles of spirits and photographs hidden in the tatami’s folds are arranged in and around the mats. Continuing the artist’s interest in the body without representation, the horizontal mats allude to a modular, migrating body in states of rest, dreaming or death, while speaking to layered histories of multiple origins. A chorus of plaster and metal cast baby birds, crying open mouthed and awaiting nourishment sit atop the sculpture. The birds, exposed and new, are both full of life and yet precarious in their vulnerable state. They show a volatile in-between stage of development, and symbolize inheritance, regurgitation and transformation. They embody a relentless longing for the “mother” body in all its expansive forms.

The exhibition’s title is twofold, implying both birth or a new beginning––each finely tied to death and renewal––and to carry, endure or support. With her work, Kang draws attention to the continuity of the body beyond its physical containment, suggesting that we are carriers of multiple durations, in perpetual cycles of life and death.

The artist gratefully acknowledges Denniston Hill for their ongoing support in facilitating space for her greenhouse, located within the ancestral territory of the Esopus people of Lenapehoking, otherwise known as Woodridge in the Southern Catskill Mountains.

Courtesy Esther Schipper.