Rob Wynne is a New York based artist born in 1950 who works in a variety of different mediums. These mediums range from hand-embroidered paintings and collage to sculpture and digital photography. The work we will be viewing from him is made with molten glass, using hand-poured and mirrored glass in a series of large-scale installations, several of which are on display. Also featured are his glass texts, in which the artist borrows words or phrases detached from their original contexts in order to generate cryptic or contradictory meanings.
The title of Wynne’s gallery activation alludes to the ephemeral nature of images. Featuring sixteen works—seemingly floating within the American Art galleries and placed in direct dialogue with selected works from the collection—the installation invites a creatively disruptive aesthetic experience. Wynne’s mirrored glass pieces explore, and slightly skew, how we experience works of art—creating reflective pauses and jolts of surprise that reveal the collection anew.
“I’m not a trained glass artist. So when I started this experimentation, it was purely by accident. I was holding a ladle of glass and it slipped out of my hand and spilled onto the floor, making a huge splat, which was absolutely spectacular.” – Rob Wynne
One: Do Ho Suh features a single, large-scale work by Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh, whose work engages with migration and cultural displacement. The Perfect Home II is a full-scale re-creation of the artist’s former apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City and his home for 19 years. Visitors are invited to walk through the hand-sewn, translucent fabric replica, which includes details such as light fixtures, radiators, and even an intercom.
Drawing on a longing for home, feelings Suh initially experienced as an immigrant, the work highlights the important connections we make between physical places and memory. Currently based in London, Suh, like other globally acclaimed artists, lives a nomadic existence, traveling from city to city to execute commissions and participate in exhibitions. But having created sculptures that allow him “to carry my house with me,” he is at home wherever he is.
South Korean artist Kwang Young Chun combines hundreds of paper-wrapped parcels to create sculptural compositions, called Aggregations, that look like crystal formations, asteroids, or the surface of the moon. The Aggregations are simultaneously Space Age and nostalgic, beautiful and violent, powerful and fragile. They draw on the artist’s training in abstract painting as well as memories of his childhood, when Korean apothecaries sold medicine in similar little bundles.
Each parcel is wrapped in old book pages, printed in the traditional manner on Korea’s celebrated mulberry-pulp paper, called hanji. Chun compares the parcels to cells or units of information, and sees analogies to both chemistry and the human condition in the ways that the parcels interact physically: sometimes meshing, sometimes clashing. He compares the fragmentary passages of text on the wrappers—most taken from classics of Korean and Chinese philosophy—to voices overheard in a crowd.
