Warm Walls, Organized by The Latent Space

June 3, 2022 - July 9, 2022

Monaco is pleased to host Warm Walls, a duo exhibition organized as an exchange with The Latent Space (Chicago, IL). Warm Walls features artists Andrew Park (Los Angeles, CA) and S.H. Kim (Chicago, IL) in the Main Space, and is organized by Kalan Strauss, the director of The Latent Space.

Warm Walls will run through Sunday, July 9, 2022, with viewings available on Saturdays from 12-4pm and by appointment.

Warm Walls brings together the work of S.H. Kim and Andrew Park. Both artists tap into a collective nostalgia by rendering, in their respective mediums, a single frame of video. S.H. Kim engages with memory by sourcing imagery from the Japanese and American animations he watched as a child in South Korea. Common in these animations are explosion sequences. He takes a single frame from these explosions and copies the image using oil sticks to create tactile and radiant abstractions. He freezes in time a split-second explosion to create an experience of what he calls ‘sublime, majesty, and catharsis’.

Parallel to Kim’s approach, Andrew Park’s painted stills - taken from low-resolution photos - explore the impermanence of memory. Park uses his hyper-realist style to render the motion blur of video imagery recorded at night. His paintings of fireworks, light bulbs, and bonfires are a blur of motion and energy. Specificity is lost, but a visceral nostalgia remains. Kim and Park encapsulate moments with materials that starkly contrast one another and together their work collides to overflow with the warmth of memory.

BIOS

Andrew Park (b. 1996) graduated with a BFA degree in Illustration at ArtCenter College of Design in 2018. He lives and works in Los Angeles where he’s shown in the “Funsized” group show at Leimin Space (Chinatown), LA Art Show; ArtCenter Gallery; and Barely Fair, The Latent Space booth. He was awarded in Society of Illustrators 2018 and published in American Illustration 37. Andrew also teaches in schools around Los Angeles including Gnomon School, ArtCenter College of Design, Brainstorm School, and LAAFA.

Andrew Park challenges himself to create imagery that goes beyond traditional realism and into contemporary hyper-realism that plays with the materiality of mediums and the human condition. He is naturally drawn to the figure and more specifically, our dealings with memory and perception. Moments that are commonly forgotten or mundane are reference areas he pulls from. Within those brief flashes are where we commonly relate to one another’s experiences. As his and our memories fade, he participates in the obscurity with a paling retrospection.

S.H.Kim (b. 1992) is a Korean painter. Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. He earned his BFA in Painting and BA in Art Studies from Hongik University, South Korea. This year he earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kim’s works show simplicity, sincerity, and authenticity like Milton Avery and Philip Guston. The materials he chooses, such as oil pastels and oil sticks, give viewers a sense of intimacy when they see his paintings. With his paintings, Kim shows how contemporary film and literature with distinct characteristics are reduced down to uniform colors when processed through consumer culture. More recently, Kim has started using animations from his childhood as references. With Japanese and American animations from the 1980s to the 2000s, he combines the nostalgia of those days with contemporary paintings for S.H.Kim’s latest series.

Download the Works List for Warm Walls, provided by The Latent Space and the artists

Kalan Strauss is an interdisciplinary artist and the director of The Latent Space. Strauss is originally from Los Angeles, California, and currently lives and works in both Los Angeles and Chicago, Illinois. Strauss graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with his BFA in painting, video/new media, and art and technology.

Strauss grew up in Los Angeles and through his father's professional involvement as an actor, spent a lot of his childhood in Hollywood. Instead of getting a babysitter, Strauss would be taken - along with his dog, Lucky - to his father’s auditions and gigs. While his father did voice acting, Strauss would sit in the room and be on set during on-camera work. It was here that Strauss became aware of the construction of representational images not often visible when the finished image is presented. This interest is apparent throughout Strauss’ work, with many of the formal qualities aimed at challenging the veracity of an image and revealing the construction of a given representational, visual experience.

Strauss works in multiple mediums including painting, 3D animation/CGI, machine learning, real-time video, and light. He uses 3D animation/computer graphics and digital media as a sketching process to create reference imagery for physical work in hopes of merging traditional methods with the future of art. Strauss explores the space in between digital, physical, perceptual and figurative. The techniques are meant to be a critique of the environment that informed his upbringing. Strauss relies upon the ubiquity of new media and its familiarity as a tool to connect directly with the viewer.

Strauss’s practice is centered around the unification of opposing characterizations and the immediacy of experience. Strauss routinely develops various series of independent but related works that reveal the structure of visual experience.

For all inquiries and appointments please contact:
Nick Schleicher nickschleicherart@gmail.com or Monaco at info@monacomonaco.us