601Artspace, New York, USA
June 11 - August 31, 2022
Shin il Kim
"Slippage" installation view including Shin il Kim "Door" and "Water", 2003, video loop
“When you’re looking at two things, don’t look at them, look between them.”
–John Baldessari
Conceived during a time of particular uncertainty, Slippage examines different ways in which artists articulate liminal space: personal, geographical, material, and temporal. If liminal refers to the physical or psychological state of being “in-between,” then the pandemic’s effects have created a perfect storm of uncomfortable collective liminality. The fundamental organization of everyday life was ripped away and what had previously felt predictable became unstable, resulting in a shared but often isolating state of limbo.
This lingering limbo is a unique vantage point from which to view artwork–as artwork itself emerges from the uncharted expanse between what is and what could be. The works in this exhibition, disparate in subject matter and execution, place the viewer in moments of what is sometimes known as slippage: the revealing of a juncture where disparate elements meet. This moment can be a physical space, a momentary experience, or a literal threshold. For instance, Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s “Imponderabilia” (shown as a film of the original performance) asks the viewer to make an emotionally loaded, split-second decision about how and if they will pass through a doorway flanked by a naked man and woman, mere inches between their bodies. In Marcelo Moscheta’s video Pau Brasil, a hand gradually removes bark spines from the trunk of the Pau Brasil tree, a vital natural resource exploited to exhaustion and a symbol of Brazilian national identity. The video articulates a state of ecological, psychological and economic vulnerability, or what the artist calls “an eternal dispute between maintaining the roots that make us a nation or surrendering to dominant influences, global and foreign, that slowly remove what [is] most valuable..”
Borrowing from the fields of literature, psychology, and architecture as well as visual art, Slippage invites viewers to experience the uncomfortable junctures of human experience, veering from the personal and intimate to the existential and global.
About the curator:
Jess Van Nostrand is Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Jess was previously Assistant Director of Exhibition Programs & Gallery Initiatives at the Museum of Modern Art, and Founding Director of The Project Room, a works-in-process art center that cultivated public discussion about how creativity works. Jess currently serves as a Trustee of the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. She received her BA in Art History from The George Washington University and her MA in Art History from Richmond, The American University in London.