Sejin Kim and InYoung Yeo: dot.dot.dot.

GRUNT GALLERY, Vancouver BC - To Jun 22
by Michael Turner
We see them in emails and in texts and in old family letters. Dictionaries like Google’s know them as ellipses (“the omission[s] from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues”), but we know them – and often give voice to them – as dot, dot, dot. For grunt’s first exhibition under director Vanessa Kwan, Seoul-based artists Sejin Kim and InYoung Yeo evoke the ellipsis to “explore the omnipresence of interactive technologies and their varying effects on human experience.”
Kim’s Mosaic Transition (2019) is a two-channel video inspired by political fallout over the presentation of images documenting cross-border CO₂ emissions to the South Korean government, which summarily denounced these images as “fictional visualizations.” Using open-source imagery, Kim has constructed a work that emulates algorithmic data calculations to produce a new series of images that alternate “apparent fact” with its “subsequent replacement.” The result is a layered and fast-moving chronicle of how the “real world” effects of environmental degradation “dovetail with the tools and technologies of data collection and manipulation.”
Though equally attuned to recurrence and deferral, Yeo’s Happily Ever After (2019) uses wallpaper and sculpture in her investigation of “technology as a contemporary interlocutor for human desire.” For Yeo, “lust becomes an impulse that drives technological interaction at the same time as it can never be fully satisfi ed by it.” Like Kim, Yeo is not against the advance of digital technology; both artists contend with an “embodied perspective in a technological environment that, in both promise and imperfection, is intertwined with our survival.”
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