​April is the cruelest month because it rouses us from our wintry slumber, beginning again the cycle of life and death, hope and failure, known and unknown. This exhibition April, named after this month of opening and closing, acknowledges that life is regulated by such cycles, whether natural or artificial, bodily or societal, intergenerational or artistic. Each artist in this exhibition engages with the present in the face of inevitable change, striving to perceive it, catch it, or watch it pass by in their work. 

 

Catie Dillon’s large-scale abstract paintings aim to capture the energy contained within delimited spaces—the borders of the canvas, the surface of the body—creating and discovering spiraling gestures made with a brush or squeegee. Through a process of building up and scraping away, Dillon builds a reciprocal relation between gesture and image into an emotional crescendo, the color and visual density of each painting suggesting shifting moods or ever-changing atmospheres.

 

James Elam’s sculptures blur the lines between visual, tactile, and sonic experience. His three-dimensional sculptures, made of copper wire wound around hooks in geometric designs, are large microphones that pick up the invisible cycles of sound waves in the gallery space. Inspired by techno and the DJ’s role as synchronizer of music and audience, Elam’s sculptures aim to synchronize the sensuous experience of the viewers and the art space through visual and sonic rhythms.

 

Hwi Hahm’s large-scale paintings are concerned with cycles inherent in painting—those of an individual painting’s genesis and development, of motifs that repeat and permutate across paintings in a series, and of art historical forms that are digested by paintings made at a later date. Hahm’s paintings wrestle to free themselves from the paint that came before, both on their surface and in art history, until, like butterflies fighting to escape from their chrysalis, they emerge into their final form: anxious fledglings facing the world for the first time. 

 

David Moy’s photographic works conceptualize time as a composite construction of the mind made from a series of discrete, superimposed images. Moy problematizes the relation between material and mind, moment and time, by making apparent the image’s transformation from digital file to print: printing the same image multiple times to build up the materiality of the ink, using paper that the ink adheres to poorly to create drips and blurs, or physically erasing the printed image. The prints’ slippage between photographic image and material object show memory to be a fallible accumulation of inky residue, exposing the gap between what was originally captured and its final form.

 

Michael Anthony Simon’s interdisciplinary practice creates ecosystems of ideas, exploring the distinction between nature and artifice, vision and language, animal and human in precise greyscale paintings, fabricated sculptures, and installation pieces. Simon’s work often omits the artist’s hand, eschewing romantic notions of individual genius for an idea of an artist as a participant in the natural-artificial human world, playing with the forms we find ourselves among in order to point to how we see, think, and communicate. 

 

Byungsuk Yoon’s photographs take advantage of photography’s documentary potential to play with its relation to expectation: expectation of how a photograph will turn out, of how a life will develop over time, of documentary truthfulness. Yoon’s daily photographs of his wife’s pregnancy, his documentation of his growing daughter's clothes, and his snapshots of his family’s attempts to present a well-composed photo foiled by gusts of wind or a squirming child are testaments to our desire to document the cycles of life, and the sometimes humorous, sometimes awkward gap between our expectations and how the photographs actually appear. 

 

Each artist’s work is not simply an external investigation of cycles and rhythms as a conceptual framework, but a process that moves and is moved by these rhythms. April is a momentary synchronization of these different artists’ rhythms: a final crescendo at the close of this phase of graduate school and the opening of a new unknown. 
 

- Written by Anna Gregor