Soo Sunny Park’s studio in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is a literal hive of activity. Along with her assistants, she is bending and snapping together the last pieces of BioLath, an installation piece which opens at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, on February 25th. The diamond-cut metal lath is being twisted into a series of organic, cloud-like shapes whose sensual curvature isn’t just an exercise in aesthetics. The edges of the mesh are sharp, the modular sections are intentionally transparent, and the finished work, unlike classic sculpture whose form is meant to viewed at a respectable distance, is built to be walked through, seen through, the completed installation physically fragmented by both the viewer’s perspective and the light that moves through it.

Soo Sunny Park, concept model for BioLath, installation at the Currier Museum, 2017 | photo courtesy the artist

Displacement, perception, and self-awareness are central themes that move through Park’s installation art. Park emigrated to the United States at age 11, and had already begun to grapple with the central questions that would later take physical form in her adult work. “I went through an existential crisis when I was six,” she says. “I began to wonder about existence and why I can’t see my own face, my own eyes, and why I always feel like I’m looking out from the inside. How others see me, the body, is not how I’m aware of it. Then you start to ask about consciousness. Is there life after this? You question if there’s a soul. I try to think about that kind of duality when making art, and what happens in the middle.”

Soo Sunny Park, concept drawing for BioLath (detail). Installation at the Currier Museum, 2017 | Photo courtesy the artist

Park, a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, began her career as a painter. Struggling to understand the role of painting, she grew increasingly interested in sculpture, a form whose physical possibilities drew her attention. Debating the inherent differences between the two, Park took on a new project. “I poured paint on the floor and cut it to form a body,” she explains. “It was a clothing piece, but was it also a painting—or did I just create a sculpture? Now you’re inside the artwork. Now you see the world from inside of a painting, inside the sculpture. I tried to flip the kind of space that the viewer would experience so that they’re wearing the piece and looking out from a reverse perspective.”

Soo Sunny Park, Silver Linings, 2015 | Photo courtesy the artist

Park came to Hanover in 2005, having taken a professorship at Dartmouth College with the idea of making New England her home. As an installation artist used to a much more aggressive urban landscape, she was once again faced with issues of displacement. “I moved around a lot as a kid and was a bit afraid of being in a rural area. A lot of artists feel they have to be in New York, obligated to show up at certain events and see certain people. There’s not that kind of pressure here. It’s a different speed of life, and I feel focused. So being in a quieter place, especially as an installation artist, has been great.”

Soo Sunny Park | Photo by David Nielsen

Soo Sunny Park, sculptor
Lebanon, New Hampshire
Website
Twitter
Instagram

Top photo Unwoven Light, 2013 | Photo courtesy the artist

The post Stretching the Form appeared first on Take Magazine.

The Museum plans to add, “…three object-study rooms, a sweeping public reception space, and a number of stunning new galleries, along with renovations to the existing Charles Moore galleries.” Hood Museum estimates the project will continue through 2018, culminating with a spectacular reopening gala in 2019, Dartmouth’s 250th anniversary.

Laetitia Soulier: The Fractal Architectures on view at Hood Downtown | Photo by Alison Palizzolo

Fortunately, due to the efforts of John Stomberg and many other folks working for Hood, the museum will continue exhibiting art in a newly opened space on Main street in Hanover New Hampshire named Hood Downtown. Though the space is a bit smaller than the soon-to-be-expanded Hood Museum, Hood Downtown will use its central location and strategic space as a platform for global contemporary art, or, as Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, curator of African Art, said, “We’re interested in showing living artists from all over the world. We wanted to make this inviting, bringing the global to the local.”

Smooth is the curator of the second exhibition to enter the new downtown space featuring Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Bahar Behbahni titled Let the Garden Eram flourish. Mostly through painting, but also through objects and video, Behbahni captures the fraught majesty of these Persian or Iranian gardens and lends her own subjective, specific historical context to the green spaces. Filling Hood Downtown with redacted documents, paintings, and depictions of reimagined historical timelines, Bahar seeks to show not only her work inspired by the reality of the gardens but also, according to Smooth, “the objects that served as an inspiration for the exhibition.”

Bahar Behbahani, Chronicle of the Garden, from the Let the Garden Eram Flourish series, 2016

Hood Downtown will continue with programming contemporary art for Dartmouth students and the broader community until the expansion at the Hood Museum is complete. Until then, keep track of their Upcoming Exhibitions at Hood Downtown. 

Hood Downtown is a new, temporary exhibition space on 53 Main Street, Hanover New Hampshire. Let the Garden Eram Flourish will be on view at Hood Downtown January 12, 2016 through March 12, 2017. Check out the Hood Museum at Darthmouth’s Facebook page for updates on the expansion and up-coming exhibitions.

All photos courtesy Hood Museum

The post Hood is Downtown…For Now appeared first on Take Magazine.