Renewed Memories - Media Art Created With Personal Retrospective

On View: November 1st – December 7th 
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 1st, 6-9 p.m.

Curated by Xiaowen Zhu
Presented by The Arcade Gallery

Artists: Andy Fedak, Derek Larson, Jiankun Xie, Su Hyun Nam, Yoon Chung Han, Yumi Kinoshita

Marymount College Arts & Media Division’s Arcade Gallery is proud to present Renewed Memories – Media Art Created With Personal Retrospective, a group exhibition featuring media artworks that probe the boundary between individual perception and public memory. The selected artworks, created by six artists from four countries, demonstrate an explorative journey from physical and mental experience to metaphysical and philosophical representations with creative visual, acoustic, and interactive languages.

Using sculpture, photography, video, CG animation, custom software, and interactive media design, the artists not only capture events from their observation, but also create a representation of the memory and question the conception of representation. Japanese visual artist Yumi Kinoshita collects found footage of notable events in life, and abstracts recognizable visual elements in the footage to re-create a blurred recognition of happening. Her process reflects how we perceive events and convert them to be part of a collective memory. Chinese photographer Jiankun Xie takes the similar approach in his still photographs of architecture to express his philosophical mind of nothingness on subjects he sees in daily life – 'This is the world that I see. I stop, press the shutter, and leave.'

American artists Andy Fedak and Derek Larson work with metaphor and imagination. In Orange Country Surreality, Fedak composites 3D animated objects into a video documentation of urban environment. By doing this, the artist questions the territory between real and surreal. Appropriating video footage from a 90s TV show, Larson superimposes yellow measurement scales next to each character's body parts and thus humorously questions the existence of physical space in relation to the representation and conception of that space.

Though working with different media, Korean artists Su Hyun Nam and Yoon Chung Han are both heavily inspired by nature and its relation to personal space. This exhibition is presenting three pieces from them, coincidently sharing the same element from nature – trees. Metamorphosis is a single-channel video, in which Su Hyun Nam captures multiple videos of a tree from various angles and digitally manipulates them to composite a weaving collage which alters the common perception of a mundane image. For her, the tree serves as a focal point in her meditative process of observation. What she shows is a paradoxical dialogue between the representation of space and the suggestion of a contiguous context. Different from Su Hyun Nam's metaphysical approach, Yoon Chung Han works directly with the material. In her interactive installation Across the Universe, a tree truck is converted to a musical instrument wherein a set of marbles are placed on top of the tree rings that represent different orbits in space. Putting the marbles in different positions, viewers are able to manipulate and modify the frequencies of pre-recorded sound in real time. Together with the installation, Yoon is also showing Tree Rings, a sculpture piece that explores the organic essence of sound.

Renewed Memories is on view from November 1st to December 7th. 

About Arcade Gallery
The Arcade Gallery, located in historic downtown San Pedro Arts and Entertainment District, the Port of Los Angeles, is a fixed exhibition venue of Marymount College. It offers students fully equipped facilities to exhibit their work in a variety of media. Dedicated to the connection between art and education, the gallery also presents work from celebrated and emerging artists, curated by either faculty or students of the Division of Arts & Media at Marymount College.

For further information:
Xiaowen Zhu, Gallery Manager, [email protected]
Blue Wade, Arts & Media Division Chair, [email protected]