“Have you been to Morris Graves yet?” That’s what a former student asked me, wide-eyed, when I ran into them on the evening of Arts Alive at nearby gallery. “There’s a great sculptural installation show.” They nodded to emphasize the word “great.”
Another gallery goer chimed in and agreed, “Really cool and weird.”
Then in class this week, someone said, “Did you go to Arts Alive? There’s a really interesting sculpture show with these figures that are strange and creepy and covered with fascinating textures.”
And over the phone a friend told me, “I liked the sculptures at Morris Graves. I actually really liked the painting show upstairs, too.”
I told her they were the same artist, and she said, “No way!”
My friend didn’t say, “No way!” because the figurative sculptures in Seongmin Yoo’s Pulses of Experiences and the surreal paintings in her Artemis: Vision of the Universe don’t relate to one another — they certainly do. Both the two- and three-dimensional works include figures that bulge into ambiguous globular forms, a conflicted sense of playfulness and sharp disease, and moon-jumping acrobatic motion.
My friend’s surprise was because it feels special when an artist shows work in profoundly different media and the work in one medium doesn’t profoundly outshine the other. It’s like on cooking competition shows when a chef presents an ingredient prepared two ways. The judges suck their teeth and shake their heads because it’s nearly impossible to not compare the one thing with the other, which inevitably highlights the defects in the weaker dish. Here though, the pairing enhances both shows. One informs the other and draws out their shared details, brings up questions about what is left out and what is included in each body of works. Significantly, color is the marked difference between the two sets.
The mid-sized, narrative Artemis scenes are curious and oblique. In each picture, we know there’s a story, but can’t quite tell what it is. They are bold and saturated, as if the pictorial spaces are lit by an intense and nearby other sun. Many have a leaping movement that shares qualities with, but is not quite the same as, the dramatic movement in the life-sized Pulses of Experience sculptures. The sculptures are suspended from the architecture of the gallery in contorted, flipping, dramatic falling postures. They are muted, white-gray ash and have pocked and mottled textures embedded with feathers and plant matter and objects Yoo acquires as she “move[s] through the landscape, collecting materials others might reject.”
Especially when compared with the paintings, the sculptural figures seem drained of color, aptly representing the shocked internal experience of “immobility, a reaction that premeditates a fight or flight,” which is the artist’s aim. The arrested, distressed body forms made me remember a long-ago friend telling me how she had experienced the first instant after discovering a catastrophic personal tragedy. “Everything slowed down,” she said, “I felt like time might even be able to move backward.”
One contracted figure with outstretched hands and fingers has a dark, roundish concave void filling the front of the head area. I see it as a gaping mouth screaming and in the same instant a scooped out, redacted face.
Yoo’s press release states: “The artist addresses the violence of consistent tensions between movement and the absolute stillness that is emblematic of [the attentive immobility] psychological state.” I resonate personally with her descriptions and artistic themes. In my thesis years ago, I wrote about “the tension between stillness and frenzy,” and probably still have that line in my most recent artist statement. So I started to wonder if Yoo’s absolute stillness is the same stillness I like to explore. What different stillnesses might there be?
I went on a looping thought journey from T.S. Eliot’s line, “And do not call it fixity, where past and future are gathered,” past the Big Bang, through the sensation of being paralyzed with fear, and landed at meditative absorption, before I remembered that I was supposed to be writing about the artwork in front of me. This thought diversion, to me, is a high achievement for works of art. It’s what good art can do: illuminate connections between things and open a path for consideration.
Yoo describes a stillness that is “a natural state of being that is deeply connected to the environment, [but which] we rarely slow down enough to truly experience.” She asserts, “We live in a time shaped by constant motion, chaos and urgency, especially in urban life. At the same time, there is a deep human need for quiet, immobility and the space to experience nature.” For many of us who are prodded by ideas of stillness — Yoo, me and other artists, and wellness devotees, and meditation app downloaders and developers — her statement that we have “a need for quiet, immobility” rings true. There is a cultural sense that stopping is something important and also something we don’t get to do. Stopping what though, might be open for some debate.
I came away from the exhibition with a sense that the vivid Artemis paintings are of the mind: moving and generative, full of potentiation, but ultimately imaginary. The Pulses of Experience sculptures, on the other hand, are of the body: three-dimensional, visceral, vulnerable and stopped, frozen in motion. In the world that is this exhibition, the mind seems free to dream while the material body is halted.
Pulses of Experience in the Thonson Gallery and Artemis: Vision of the Universe in the Knight Gallery are on view now through June 21 at the Morris Graves Museum of Art at 636 F St. in Eureka, open to the public noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays.
L.L. Kessner is an Arcata-based artist and writer.
This article appears in Your Local Coven.