Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA) Artist Talk: Namwon Choi
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From the venue:
Namwon Choi: 248 Miles
Aug 17, 2024 - Oct 12, 2024
12pm - 5pm
Artist Talk | October 3, 2024 at 7PM
2023/2024 Working Artist Project
This round of Working Artist Projects was curated by Dr. Vivian Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA)
About the Exhibition
248 Miles is a 2024 solo exhibition of new artwork by Namwon Choi at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia (MOCA GA) in Atlanta, Georgia as the culmination of her 2023 Working Artist Project Award. The exhibition will include a series of stylistically hybrid paintings in gouache and acrylic on panel that combine photorealistic landscape depictions with abstract shapes inspired by highway signs. Each painting’s shape is inspired by familiar road signs that provide guidance and information to travelers. For the past nine years Choi, a native of Seoul, Korea, has lived in cities hours away from her children. The landscape images in her work are not neutral but are taken from the dashboard of Choi’s car with an iPhone camera as she drives to see her loved ones. This has given her the uniquely American experience of interstate driving for the first time, while providing suspended durations of time to consider both the freedoms and constraints of her two cultures. This “in-betweenness” is legible in Choi’s work as it oscillates between representation and abstraction or between painting and sculpture. A notable innovation included in this exhibition will be the first bi-lingual exhibition catalog publication in MOCA GA’s history.
About Namwon Choi
Namwon Choi was included in New Worlds: Georgia Women to Watch at Atlanta Contemporary in 2023, and has had recent solo exhibitions at Laney Contemporary in Savannah, GA; the Moss Art Center at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA; and at THE END Project Space in Atlanta, GA. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the New York City Korean Culture Center, the Los Angeles Korean Culture Center, the Korean Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., and the B20 Wiregrass Biennial at the Wiregrass Museum in Dothan, Alabama. She has had her work included in the Aqua art fair and Untitled art fair in Miami, FL. Her work has been reviewed in the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Frieze magazine. She has been awarded residencies at MASS MOCA in North Adams, MA; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA; and the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, GA. Choi earned a BFA and MFA from Hongik University in Seoul, Korea and an MFA from Georgia State University in Atlanta. She has taught all levels of drawing and painting at the university level since 2012.
Image above – detail of: Untitled, 2024, acrylic and gouache on panels, 13″X54″X3″ by Namwon Choi.
Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, the Antinori Foundation, and the AEC Trust, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Jun 8, 2024 - Aug 3, 2024
12pm - 5pm
Opening Reception | June 7, 7PM
Exhibition Tickets
Artist Talk | July 18, 7PM
2023/2024 Working Artist Project
This round of Working Artist Projects was curated by Dr. Vivian Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA)
About the Exhibition
“I have introduced neon into my studio practice and quickly found a deep affinity for it over the last year. Neon glass and concrete share certain qualities; they’re both liquid in their workable state, and both become brittle solids which can be strong yet fragile. To make some of these sculptures, I have formed ropes from fiber and cement, and made weavings around neons that both hold them up and tie them down. I also cast concrete directly into pool floats and balloons, capturing the shape of cavities made for air, allowing them to solidify with neon glass intertwined. I’m drawn to the care and play that goes into making these sculptures work, physically. Each work often takes several broken versions to create one where the glass stays intact. There are moments where grief and damage move through these media, as well as cycles of repair and resilience. When complete, these forms, squeezed and wrapped by neons and dried in my hands, bear marks of the support and touch required to make them. The resulting sculptures’ hard and soft qualities, appearing both liquid and solid, are poetically thick with parallels to gender fluidity and the precariousness of “passing” as a queer person, existing as both and neither of the binary states, but rather something else outside them.”
–Jane Foley
About Jane Foley
Jane Foley has created public sound sculptures for the Architecture Triennale in Lisbon, Portugal and La Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille, France with Zurich-based Sound Development City, as well as composed sounds that played in taxicabs throughout the 5th Marrakech Biennale in Morocco. In Atlanta, they have created works for the High Museum, Flux Projects, The Atlanta Contemporary, and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, among others. Foley currently teaches art at Emory University.
Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, the Antinori Foundation, and the AEC Trust, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.