American Ghosts
Yeon Ji Yoo
June 14 to July 16, 2022
Opening reception: Saturday, June 18 - 12:00-3:00
“For some reason waves hitting the shore bring uneasiness to some, especially when they look out over a scene that grows 20 percent larger than expected. But when it came down to it, I seemed to be in the middle of the road. I connected with that miraculous line which brought the sky together with the ocean, a sensation of being a part of an endless horizon. Everything silent, everything real”.
-Amrita, Banana Yoshimoto (page 120)
I love this description of the growing distance to the horizon because it speaks of the actual physics of standing on the surface of the curved earth, a single lonely perspective in which the end point gets approached constantly but never truly arrived at.
As a latchkey kid growing up in the 80’s, I learned a version of America as a technicolor landscape with friendly but tall mountains and lush woods full of mischievous critters trolling vacationers. I loved the stories of Paul Bunyon and his giant blue ox Babe striding across mountain valleys somewhere in the majestic forest. I prayed fervently to glimpse Sasquatch from my campfire one day. I dreamed of traveling to this version of America. And I have since visited many of the most beautiful national parks and iconic vistas of this American Dream.
But what I have learned is that technicolor is not the name of a place, but a process of making fiction. American Dreams turn into American Ghosts once the place they are tied to disappears, and that the only power American Ghosts have is to be forgotten.
American Ghosts is a collection of new works in which landscape paintings and the sculptural manifestations of aspects of these places are in dialogue to debate a mirage versus a reality, set in an echo chamber to amplify questionable notions and then, as the conclusion is never arrived at, fades.
