SHANE BRADFORD, KIM YOUNG-HUN

CHOI&LAGER Gallery is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition, presenting new and recent paintings and sculptures by Shane Bradford (UK) and Kim Young-Hun (Korea).

These two remarkable artists have been brought together under the theme of the middle distance. This is not to be understood in terms of a noun denoting an aspect of a landscape that is ‘neither particularly close or far away’, but rather as the tentative, intuitive tapping of a productive mental space in which the concepts we use to structure and apprehend lived experience-time, space, meta/physical-can be loosened, freely associated, re-combined and represented.

For Korean painter Kim Young-Hun, whose practice has long been concerned with mass media, this space is the culturally-loaded gap between LP’s and MP3’s: the observable continuity and material artifacting of the analog versus the discrete bits and binary voids of the digital. Chiming with as-yet-unprovable observations in medical science that suggest that humans embody both processes simultaneously-and a cultural environment in which digital communication increasingly supplants physical presence-Kim’s work intuitively collapses the distinction between digital and analog. Using the Hyeokpil leather-brush technique, his finely-resolved figurative elements bleed out into unplanned lines, swirls and gradients which are repeated across the plane, resulting in an abstract landscape that speaks equally of analog waveforms and digital pixel-glitching, at once crsytalline and noisy.

Time, rather than space, underpins the work of Shane Bradford. Temporality is, of course, virtually inseparable from narrativity, and through a thoughtful process of layering, amalgamating and transposing temporally-disparate functional objects, Bradford reconfigures and re-animates their narrative potential. Ice cores and mammoth tusks, signifiers of deep time, reveal themselves to be interpenetrated with modern paraphernalia. The artist’s discarded clothes, soaked in the paint and pressed into canvas (Accretion series) form a poetic psuedo-index of all the events they’ve absorbed. Evocative spray-painted statements (Act Normal, Let’s Pretend) are occluded beneath Bradford’s characteristic ‘dipped’ painting process (Itself a deeply temporal affair, as evidenced by the stalactite-like formations it produces) acknowledging the medium’s loss of political import while simutaneously creating a new space of potential meaning.

The mutually-complementary works Kim Young-Hun and Shane Bradford in The Middle Distance, then, can be thought of in terms of good postmodern literature: expansively referential, metafictional, non-linear, simultaneous, under no illusion of fixity or stasis as an artwork...beneath a technicolour sheen to die for.