Ivin Ballen & Sun You. glorious modest

About

Upon viewing Ivin Ballen’s work, you first perceive a jumble of colored shapes haphazardly arranged on a vast backdrop. Upon closer inspection, these shapes resolve themselves into an assemblage of material scraps like tape, wood and clay. Ballen has written of his tenderness for scraps, often those unused odds and ends left in the wake of other projects. This sense of care is evident in his painstaking casting of these pieces in colored paint and resin-a reification in labor that reimagines the casually discarded fragments in a new and enduring wholeness.

Sun You gathers a mix of everyday craft materials to create colorful abstract designs that hover between fine art and craft decor. Her works use commonplace materials like clay, costume jewelry and filigreed wood in a celebration of color, ornament and gesture. Her recent floor installations arrange small abstract compositions of colorful polymer clay. They are arranged in loose groupings not dissimilar from goods in a retail display or food laid out on a banquet table. Their association with domesticity and baking is reinforced by You’s handbuilding techniques of rolling, pinching and firing the individual works in an oven.