Myeongsoo Kim + Jessie Rose Vala. Dusk To Dust

About

Kim and Vala employ a metaphorical lens to empower a reciprocal inquiry into the elemental connections between the interior/personal and the exterior/universal. Through an architectural intervention, the gallery space transforms into a suite of micro and macro experiences that augment each artist’s connection to temporality and its growing ephemera. These artistic approaches unpack a discovery of place and an engagement with materials, as much as it aggregates mysticism, the illumination of perception, and mankind’s dystopian hand.

Myeongsoo Kim collects, hoards even, scavenged fragments of detritus that are meticulously reconfigured by studious craft and precision into refined, ambiguous shrines of memory and mythology. These accumulated objects and images, facilitated by the march of geologic time, become imbued with ever shifting symbolic nuance. Presented as non sequitur collections and fetishized curios, these visual containers strike the fine balance between celebrating the resurrection of discarded materials and the transient connotations of memento mori. 

Jessie Rose Vala employs totemic sculptural objects and ritualized performances of, on and about the sacrosanct soils of the western landscape. Vala’s nonlinear narratives depict the ceremonial redemption of sacred places spoiled by human intervention and historical residue. By constructing personally derived rituals, the artist questions if the tumult of technology will someday project a vision of natural order back onto the dust.