Heeseop Yoon 'Adrift' exhibit finds new home at CVPA Campus Gallery at UMass Dartmouth
Last spring, Heeseop Yoon, a Brooklyn-based South Korean-born visual artist, traveled to New Bedford and met with Viera Levitt, the gallery director of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth.
Yoon spent a significant amount of time exploring the studios and public spaces of the Star Store building and doing intricate illustrations in anticipation of creating a large-scale drawing installation in the University Art Gallery. She envisioned utilizing the columns within as an extension of her drawings, pushing the artwork to ceiling level.
However, in mid-August, the administration unceremoniously displaced the art students and the faculty, loaded dumpsters with equipment and personal belongings, and closed the building to the public.
But art, like life, finds a way. Levitt and Yoon moved the long-scheduled exhibition to the CVPA Campus Gallery at the North Dartmouth campus, taking into consideration the vastly different space. The exhibition is called “Adrift,” and the name is an apt one, given that, for at least a short time, it was unmoored.
It is a testament to the artist’s resilience and creativity, as she rolled with the punches and executed an intricate and beguiling installation in the not-the-space she was originally offered and did it with great aplomb.
There are eight works of art in the gallery. Seven of them are pen drawing collages on paper, some with the inclusion of etching. All are detailed with a great sense of intimacy and interaction between the individual components that make up the whole.
The titles include “Still Life with Chandeliers- Seoul, Philadelphia, New York” from 2021 and “Still Life with Venus” from 2022.
And then, there is “Art School Still Life- New Bedford” from this year, which already works as a visual artifact containing spools of yarn or thread, buckets of ink and dye, pens, markers, spray bottles, piles of patterned cloth and other tools and materials that would have been used by students in the fabric and surface design studios.
It functions as a memento mori.
But nonetheless, it is “Still Life with Pedestals” that takes up much of the space, both physically and emotionally. A large sprawling drawing that oozes across the floor and climbs up the walls like ivy. It is a beautiful wasteland of the everyday unremarkable stuff of life, made remarkable by Yoon’s vision.
Her medium is thin strips of black masking tape on sheets of white mylar and she bends and twists and manipulates the tape to do her bidding, producing a sprawling still life that is both cohesive and chaotic, again like life itself.
Amidst it all, the elements include a baby doll, mannequin heads, lotion bottles, a can of Folgers decaf, a rotary telephone, wire snips, a clock, and an organ (of the musical variety) and a rack of CDs or LPs, but it's hard to determine which, as the scale of everything is in flux and fluid. And there are piles and piles of wires: extension cords, speaker wire and the like, all coiled and twisted and unraveling, refusing to be still. Even in a still life.
Denied the promised columns of the Star Store, Yoon substituted a couple of short pedestals and the end of a floating gallery wall, allowing her to continue her drawings up and down their sides and across their tops, injecting an engaging vibrant three-dimensionality.
Yoon isn’t afraid to be adrift. She clearly enjoys the curve over the straight line. And really, who doesn’t? Sometimes you gotta bend with the curve.
The CVPA Campus Gallery has expressed its thanks to SAPAR Contemporary Gallery + Incubator in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood and to founder Nina Levent for their support and collaboration.
“Heeseop Yoon / Adrift” is on display at the CVPA Campus Gallery, UMass Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Rd., North Dartmouth, until Nov. 12.
"Art Beat" is a weekly arts column by contributing writer Don Wilkinson.
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Heeseop Yoon presents 'Adrift' at UMass Dartmouth CVPA Campus Gallery
