MAYA 1300

MAYA Solo Exhibition featuring Seung Mo Park 
March 8 - April 7, 2012 Opening Reception: Thursday, March 8, 6 - 8 pm 
 
BLANK SPACE is pleased to present a solo exhibition titled MAYA (generally meaning "illusion" in Sanskrit) featuring selected works of Seung Mo Park. Maya is the third phase in a trajectory of Park's conceptual works dealing with reality, illusion, and existence. Barely possessing materiality of sculpture, or the ideas within them, the idea and conceptualization of MAYA is far from tangible substances.

As part of this third phase of Park's work, he has chosen to work with images of illusion rather than materiality and the results are refreshing. He is faithful to this idea of maya and the truth of people's lives, in his way examining whether our lives are a dream or reality. Further, by naming these works all MAYA followed by a number creates an almost anonymous identity to these women who represent the woman from the artist's dream, therefore giving another example of maya  in these works.

The nascent spark for this new phase of reality vs. dream may be attributed to a dream Park had. In this dream, he met a woman and awoke soon afterwards, confused if the dream was reality or reality was a dream. In fact, he wasn't sure if he hadn't been the subject of the dream for the woman. In order to bring this concept to light, Park held a casting call to find models that looked like the woman in his dream. As he photographed, he worked through a contradiction by asking the model to act the opposite of how things appeared in his dream. This is why the MAYA series women look so sorrowful, as if she had just woken from her dream. In particular, this look of sorrow is both striking and breathtaking in MAYA 7616 and slightly different but equally compelling in MAYA 762 and MAYA 1618.

With his new methodology and process, Park overlaps several layers of steel mesh and rotates them slightly so they are slightly out of line with one another -- leaving a space about two finger widths between. He then sketches the contours of the images of his models on steel meshes and cuts them out, creating a three-dimensionality in these contours. Depending on the viewer's standpoint, the images may look transparent, illusory, or shadowy.

Print Bicycle 2010 Fiberglass, mold, aluminum wire (unique) 150(L) x 74(W) x 95(H) cm

Seung Mo Park