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G.L.O.W. (Gaze Living Other Worlds)
Match 6: Young Joon Kwak and Oren Pinhassi
Frieze Los Angeles Focus L.A. (Booth E10) February 14—16, 2020
Commonwealth and Council presents the sixth installment of G.L.O.W., pairing artists to face off/join forces in tribute to Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. For G.L.O.W. Match Six (Gaze Living Other Worlds) at Frieze Los Angeles 2020, Young Joon Kwak and Oren Pinhassi propose new sites of queer embodiment, offering us glimpses into liminal and underexposed spaces present in our daily realities.
Kwak’s new sculptures affirm, with defiant verve, places for queer, non-normative bodies in our social and political spheres (such as the space of the art fair), re-centering the alien, the abject, and the obscene from the margins. Flirting with Modernism, a found Herman Miller chair is transmuted into a torso in indolent repose; Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse gets a makeover, studded with casts of male sex toys. Traces of bodies abound in Kwak’s hollowed forms, burnished ectoplasmic impressions asserting a queer immanence. Their poses simultaneously suggest supplication, pleasure, distress, nostalgia, the past, the present, and the future. These shadows ultimately reveal the body through its absence, as landmark, as sites for potentiality.
All photos by Ruben Diaz
Mother Ground, 2020
Silicone, nickel silver, resin, Herman Miller chair
Approx. 32 x 24 x 23 in
The Gift, 2020
Nickel silver, resin, acrylic, pigmented wax, copper wire
Approx. 23.5 x 48 x 45 in
Sleeping Muse, 2020
Nickel silver, aluminum, dirt, rocks, resin casts of interiors of vagina replica male sex toys
Approx. 10 x 13 x 9.5 in
Venus Trap, 2020
Resin, acrylic paint, dyed walnut base
Approx. 20.5 x 12 x 12 in