mo.mentre.call

We cannot see the sky from the street. Buildings soaring high, exuberant display-windows, and a cell phone in our palm—our view is always confined to a rectangular frame. Attempting to pause to take a look at something is often considered weird or even dangerous. Eyes on the street can see but cannot take in everything. I recall the streets that I have overlooked and no longer remember.

Wherever we go, taking out a digital or phone camera to document things has become routine. Yet when reviewing the photos later on, we might feel uneasy about them. The hastily passed steps and landscapes, which we clearly saw but have no recollection of, are so easily forgotten because one cannot pause to stand still on the street. This is not sunny-bright photography but   shaky. Perhaps, the reason why those sunny photos are so fanatically popular today is the fact that people have no luxury to look at such thing on the street.

My work with the title mo.mentre.call has been developed as a series. There is no such word as mo.mentre.call. I took the liberty of composing these two words in my own terms: moment which refers to a point in time, and recall which refers to remembering something. Moments of everyday scenes in reality, by selection, are reborn in another space that is different from the real world. One aspect of this work is this process of re-composition that brings vitality to these moments—moments which appear to actually exist but suggest nowhere—onto the canvas.

Photographing moments is fundamental to the process. Also, digital work on the computer helps to present memories more clearly. Through capturing the momentary existence of things as they are with a camera, I can recall memories of that time. I transfer those moments onto a computer, disorienting boundaries, creating invisible space, and erasing something that actually existed through an aggressive spatial intervention. By means of this process, I reveal selectivity. This process also does not stop at a formalistic re-composition of space.

Mixed materials

The materials are core to bounding a space with another and they also make the space more visible. Owing to the properties of architectural/industrial materials, my work exists somewhere in between drawing and making. The materials used in the work are more like making materials than of drawing materials. All of the processes in the work embody a tool that envisions contemporaneity. In Korean society, media is rapidly expanding and my current work reflects this facet of life. The street is filled with people busily trying to record it and my work is a result of an awkward realization that these are nothing but records. Those moments being recorded will not be remembered and will fade into history—a record for the sake of a record, a moment of quick replacement, and a lost focus.

A memory laying cold.