Destinations/ Departures, Hyoju Cheon: Mapping without Scale
June 1–June 14, 2022
Iron Velvet is pleased to present Hyoju Cheon: Mapping without Scale, an exhibition curated by Ho Won Kim.
Throughout her practice, Hyoju Cheon has explored the relationship between movement, space, and materials. Her site-specific installations and performances respond to her physical surroundings and investigate how bodies traverse built environments. In Mapping without Scale, Cheon considers how the home affects the bodies that inhabit it with a series of ceramic and insulation foam objects. In addition to these physical works, during the opening of the exhibition (June 1st from 6-8 pm), the artist will stage a performance reenacting the process of creating the works.
Set in the domestic setting of the gallery, Cheon’s interventions consider the home as contradictory. Despite being a place where one may spend much of their time, the domestic space is often overlooked. Inconspicuous nooks in walls, floors, and corners are the points of departure for her installation. The site-specific works presented in Mapping without Scale map these unnoticed spaces to emphasize their presence and materiality.
The word “map” is derived from the medieval Latin mappa mundi, in which mappa means napkin or cloth, and mundi the world. Unlike the cartographic tradition, which is rooted in a scientific and exact understanding of space, Cheon’s practice is an alternate form of mapping: one that charts the body’s trajectory through space. Her process begins by sketching out the nooks and crannies in the gallery and drawing abstract and amorphous forms that inhabit them. Cheon then recreates these shapes three-dimensionally using clay or insular foam. Next, she imprints her body onto these objects, leaving remnants of her form and mass before firing the clay and carving the insular foam to capture these voids.
To Cheon, however, empty space is full of possibilities. Rather than viewing them as hollow, she suggests that they contain the potential to re-establish the relationship between the body and the home. By leaving her imprints on the objects, she invites the viewer to reconsider their relationship to the lived space. Taking into account the fact that insulation foam has historically been used as a construction material in most urban dwellings, and that ceramic is frequently employed in kitchens and bathrooms, the materials that Cheon uses refer to both the gallery’s particular built environment and a shared structure of domestic spaces.
By mapping how her own body interacts with the space and defying traditional scaling systems, Cheon locates the uncharted or hidden landscapes of our bodies’ relationship to the home. It is perhaps best understood as a practice of mapping without scale.
— Ho Won Kim
This exhibition is part of Destinations/Departures, a six-week rotating exhibition exploring the home as a dynamic space of movement, showcasing the work of artists Nick Farhi, Sophie Kovel, and Hyoju Cheon. Organized by Victoria Horrocks, Ho Won Kim and Carlota Ortiz Monasterio, it will be on view from April 28th to June 14th, 2022.
Hyoju Cheon
Hyoju Cheon (b. 1994, Seoul) is an explorer and researcher who collects movements. Her multimedia practice–often casting a space, an object, or a body in motion–responds to the conditions of a site. Her work documents bodies as they move through space, draws their trajectories, and archives the material traces they leave behind. Hyoju has exhibited her works in Seoul at Project Broom, Dongsomun, Meindo, Gallery Imazoo, and Gaon Gallery; and in New York at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the Abrons Arts Center, among others.
Ho Won Kim
Ho Won Kim is a writer and curator who is currently pursuing an MA in contemporary art history and curatorial studies. He is interested in the intersection of art and technology. His research focuses on the issues of artistic material and practical sensory behavior in contemporary art, especially the hybridization between the conventional artistic mediums and the new media. His practice spans academic writing, critical review, media production, and exhibition-making, reflecting the ever-changing communication environment.
Destinations/Departures
New York, NY—Iron Velvet is proud to present Destinations/Departures, a six-week rotating exhibition exploring the home as a dynamic space of movement, where the limits between the private and the public, the local and the global, the personal and the political, are constantly being negotiated. Through three two-week solo shows of artists Nick Farhi, Sophie Kovel, and Hyoju Cheon, Destinations/Departures probes the diverse ways in which the domestic interweaves the individual, the collective, the political, and the cultural. It will be on view from April 28th through June 11th, 2022. In Destinations/Departures, each artist establishes an intimate dialogue with the domestic space of the gallery. Conceiving home not merely as a place of dwelling, but as one of mobility—of destination, transit, and departure—the three presentations suggest diverse modes of inhabiting the world. Through an innovative use of oil and pastel on aluminum, Nick Farhi renders seemingly commonplace domestic objects as extraordinary presences: portals mediating between the personal and the social. Sophie Kovel’s bold doormat series charges the ubiquitous, quotidian object with cultural iconography and political phrases to comment on the leakage of mass media culture into the private sphere. Lastly, through a site-specific installation, Hyoju Cheon sheds light on overlooked domestic spaces—corners, steps, window frames—and activates our often unnoticed relationship with the architecture of home. Through their distinct projects, each artist conveys an experience of being at home that is marked by multiplicity, movement, and interconnection. In blurring the public and the private, Destinations/Departures hopes to be its own journey to reconceptualize one’s sense of “home” in the world.
