American Ghosts

About

New York, NY On Friday, April 7, 2023, 5-7 PM visual artists Yeon Ji Yoo and Rachel Sydlowski will present two new installations exploring the American landscape and its myths in the exhibition American Ghosts.

As a latchkey youth of the 80’s, Yeon Ji Yoo learned a version of America on television as a technicolor landscape of cerulean skies and generalized shapes overlapped to become a stand in for Yellowstone. In growing up, Yoo has learned that technicolor is not the name of a place, but a process of making fiction. In Chasing Crows, Yoo reconnects to a childhood landscape of navigating a cornfield plagued by phantom voyeur crows and inundated in color. She aims to connect the start of her American dream journey to its elusive destination of a cartoon land.

The vacationland of the Northeast serves as a locus of investigation for Rachel Sydlowski. The promise of the road, access to leisure time, the physical and mental restorative qualities of “North” play an integral role in her sculpture-based installation Summerland/Sunderland. The original Slumberland was a restaurant/motor lodge built and managed by Sydlowski’s great-uncle on the coast of Maine in the 1940s. The title is both a play on the original motor lodge’s name, “Slumberland” and “Summerland” a liminal space between the physical and astral plane, an idyllic resting place between reincarnations. The motorlogde’s lost history allows for a fabulists interpretation through the use of wood, ceramics,  modular serigraphs and found objects.

The Courtyard installation Indra’s Net created by fashion designer Nomeda Aniukstis refers to mythological Net found in Hindu and Buddhist mythology that stretches out infinitely in all directions over the universe. 

At every knot in the net there is a beautiful jewel in the shape of a heart and each jewel reflects all the other jewels in the net and; so even a slight change in one jewel is reflected across all the other jewels.

Through her installation, Nomeda reminds us that each person’s action, will reflect across the Net and affect all other people; the installation shows that we coexist with each other; one person’s existence sheds lights on all the others’.

Gallery open Friday and Saturday 5-7pm.

About the artists

Based in Westchester, NY, and a former resident of the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, Rachel Sydlowski is a visual artist and educator. She makes large-scale mixed-media installations, sculptures, and prints informed by historical architecture, planned gardens, and native plants. Recent exhibitions include a long-term installation at The Bronx Children’s Museum, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, Wassaic Project, Meta Open Arts, and MoCA Westport. Curatorial projects include; Patterns of Power at Empty Set, No Nature, and Lucky to be Here a digital exhibition through Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos and Bronx Council on the Arts.  Selected as a 2021 School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts Traveling Fellow, she will use her fellowship to explore multiple Victorian-era resorts in the Hudson Valley.

A native of South Korea, Yeon Ji Yoo immigrated to the United States with her family in 1982, most of her knowledge of her mother country and the rural farmland she was born on are locked in memories from her childhood. As a result, her work today is indelibly marked by her remembrances and the childlike awe which shaped them. Living most of her life thereafter in New York City, Yoo maintained her connections to her early upbringing, finding parallels to those strong ties in new ones she would develop through her formative years. With imagery grounded in the visions from her youth, Yoo would develop a body of work tied together, by the delicate (yet dependable) and robust (yet fickle) bonds that make and break us at our cores. Currently, Yoo is working on drawings, sculptures, and writings building a world around the transient state (material and decomposition) of a mythology she is creating based on her falsely constructed history of the Korean War refugees, her grandmother's dementia, and the fear of a generational sin that may be passed down to her. After earning her B.F.A. at the Cooper Union, Yoo became an arts educator. In 2005, Yoo earned her M.F.A. in New Forms at the Pratt Institute. She augmented her knowledge base by earning her M.S. in Environmental Science at the College of Staten Island in 2007 and continues her personal and artistic pursuit showing in New York. Her studio is based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. 

Nomeda Aniukstis studied design at Telšiai Faculty of Vilnius Art Academy in Lithuania and fashion design at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. For over 20 years Nomeda has worked for various fashion houses as a knitwear and embellishment designer. After years of successful carrier in fashion design she started her own fashion house Jademon.

Nomeda’s designs are inspired by her view of nature, the world around her and her desire to bring that view to the world.  In her work she uses different materials & techniques such knitting, crocheting, beading, embroidery, sewing and macramé. Her creative work often involves reused materials such as fabric scraps, beads and other materials, that are inspiration for new beginnings.

Gallery contact: 

Francine Rogers 

Francinernyc@gmail.com