JooLee Kang: Shiny Shelters
Keira Kotler: Gradations
September 3 – 28 at Gallery NAGA
Our fall season begins at Gallery NAGA with solo exhibitions by two mid-career female artists whose work focuses on their interior interpretation of the natural world.
JooLee Kang: Shiny Shelters and Keira Kotler: Gradations run from September 3 through 28. A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Thursday, September 5 from 5 to 7 pm.
JooLee Kang makes delicate, ornamental drawings using ink presented minimally on white paper mounted to panel. Her subjects range from the regular to the grotesque—tree branches, flowers, and fruit overlap mutated foxes with four heads and butterflies with two sets of wings. The line separating animals from plants has all but disappeared, some forms having been completely camouflaged. At once delicate and subtle they are also intensely overwrought and obsessive. Often presented as classical table arrangements one might see in the Victorian era or even exquisite bonsai trees; Kang upends the traditional with her mangled surface decoration. There’s a sense of foreboding inherent in these somewhat dark drawings, done mostly in black ink.
Kang has now introduced the vivarium—an enclosed structure used for the observation of animals and plants first created in Victorian England—as a habitat for her organisms. The structures are teeming with Kang’s curiosities, even overflowing with creatures that are playfully hanging from every side. Kang reminds us that our world exists in both fragile and secure states.
“I aim to go beyond simply recreating the mainstream issues of the present day such as humanity’s rule over nature, taking a neutral view that comes from a broader perspective and exploring the close symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature. My works are a metaphor for the close bond between humanity and nature, which are often thought of as being in diametrical opposition, or a relationship of subordination, but are in fact woven together like a single piece of fabric.”
JooLee Kang was born in South Korea and educated in Boston, a 2011 graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University program. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 SMFA Traveling Fellowship, a St. Botolph Club Artist Grant, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award in Drawing, and a Dana Pond Award in Painting. In 2018 she was the artist-in-residence at the Gyeonggi Creation Center in Gyeonggi-do, Korea and received a Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture Artist Grant. Most recently, she completed a residency at Glenfiddich AiR in Dufftown, Scotland, UK.
Keira Kotler returns to Gallery NAGA with a new series of watercolors, which she refers to as gradations. The watercolors are abstract studies with complex color; the show title, Gradations, describes the progression between two extreme points of color. Vertical in orientation, they nonetheless reference Kotler’s relationship to the landscape. Horizon lines, the sea through fog, the setting sun—these are all subjects Kotler experiences and interprets through her use of mark-making, color, and perspective.
Kotler describes the origins of her approach.
I am interested in visual and sensory perception and the possibilities that occur when one attends to the present moment. Using luminosity and the resonance of color, I create reductive artworks that engage the viewer through subtle value shifts, chromatic complexity, and compositional movement.
This body of work, entitled Gradations, represents my first watercolor series in a 20-year career as a painter. Compelled by the purity of the color and the translucency of the medium, my process consists of applying subtle layers of single hues that get blended and built up over time. By adding and subtracting paint to create gradations of color, I create secondary and tertiary hues that result in a complex tonality for the eye to process. Combining the watercolor with ground mica, glass beads and interference paint, I further enhance the surfaces with reflectivity and iridescence, enabling each piece to shift with changing vantage points, lighting conditions and architectural elements.
Stemming from a long-standing fascination in the phenomena of light and space, and rooted in color theory and psychology, these works amplify gesture and light to create nuanced perceptual experiences – ultimately serving as spaces for contemplation, and invitations for viewers to explore their own internal sensations and associations.
Keira Kotler grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts and graduated from Columbia before moving west at the end of the 1990s and settling in the Bay Area. Her paintings and photographs have been shown widely in California, Santa Fe and New York.