The exhibition was titled Chains Unlinked, and the artist, Kim Lee Kho.
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[I am in the white hat and yellow striped straw bag]
I attended the Art Gallery of Mississauga's Walk the Talk series to listen to Kim Lee Kho, the artist who is "walking the talk."
I had visited the gallery's most recent exhibition, Be a Sport and Pan American Photo Exhibition in honor of the Pan American games which are being hosted by Toronto and surrounding region, which includes Mississauga, but I couldn't understand why Kho's Chains Unlinked was included in this exhibition. I still don't, but my conclusion is that it is a separate work, sponsored by a separate body, as the online program notes inform me:
The XIT-RM is a project space dedicated to showcasing the work of emerging artists in the GTA and Mississauga region.The AGM has to accommodate six artist from the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and Mississauga region. Exhibitions which have to be displayed due to special events cannot be moved or rescheduled. And Art Galleries are eclectic places after all, so concurrent exhibition will only add to the interest.
Six artists are selected annually by the gallery’s curatorial team to exhibit work that honours the mission and mandate
of the AGM, with an emphasis on contemporary art and critical engagement.
Thanks to generous funding provided by the RBC Foundation, each exhibition features its own opening and is
accompanied by a published catalogue with a curatorial essay.
But, the gods have co-operated, and Lee fits in more than it seems.
Kendra Ainsworth, in the the AGM's program notes describe her thus:
The chain link fence is a ubiquitous structure, found in ares both urban and rural, demarcating property lines, enclosing or separating spaces, people, and objects. In her first solo museum show, Brampton-based multi-disciplinary artist Kim Lee Kho engages with this every day item both physically and symbolically, examining the formal elements of its composition and its semiotic significance, crafting an immersive installation in she not only emerges the varied media of her practice, but one i which the viewer's negotiation of the gallery space echoes the thematic content of the work.I asked Kho a couple of questions, right at the beginning of the "walk," after, which I went in the background, and just watched and listened.
Kho has often taken up the concept of barriers or enclosure, and images of chain link have appeared in previous works. However, with the multiple components of the Chains Unlinked installation, Kho offers a more in-depth and nuanced examination of how we confront and interact with barriers of all kinds - physical, social, psychological. Each of the works in this exhibition can, in a way, be viewed as a discursive strategy i the language of negotiation with the many barriers that we encounter in our lives.
Anchoring the installation is a large-scale wall drawing, Boxed In #21, an extension of Kho's earlier series. The static figure, trapped both within the frame of the image and on the wall, suggests that one possible reaction to encountering the restriction of confinement is that of abject submission. By contrast, the video Can't Ge In/Can't Get Out 2 illustrates a struggle (perhaps futile) against the physical - or metaphorical - impediment; the subject (the artist) throws herself repeatedly against the fence, attempting to either break through or scale it. At the same time, the viewer embodies the role of the captive figure, caught in between and forced to navigate through a series of hanging installations. However in Insubstantiated II and Chains Unlined, the form of the chain link fence is transmuted, becoming mere shadows on sheer panels of fabric, and the individual wire components dismantled, becoming abstracted, minimal forms. Here the seemingly resistant form of the barriers is both adapted and adapted to, as Kho suggests that barriers can be flexible, even beautiful, and rather than only being structures that are imposed upon us, perhaps barriers are sometimes boundaries we need to create for ourselves, for our own well-being.
By leaving the metaphor vague - is the fence a form of physical imprisonment, a barrier to access, an emotional wall built by us or others? - Kho allows the viewer to imbue the struggle to unlink the chains of the fence with personal significance. The fence itself is a universal signifier; our chains and how we unlink them, intensely personal.
My first question was essentially a technical one. I couldn't figure out if the perspective of the nude figure was deliberately distorted so that her arms appeared longer and thinner than the rest of her body. Kho looked perplexed at the question and said something like she intended to draw a representative nude. I surmised from that that Kho possibly rushed through her charcoal sketch to prepare it in time for the exhibition, although later on I thought that she may not be such a skilled drawer of large scale models.
The second question was more on method, or artistic intention. I asked what she felt about the piece having no permanence. After the exhibition, these charcoal drawings would be erased. And she could never re-create them (or them "exactly"). This didn't seem to bother her, and she sad that she was documenting the installation with photographs.
I have worked with installations several times. But each time, I started with tangible pieces and assembled them in the respective rooms. Three were with photographs and one with a video. Only one was "site specific" where I don't think that it would work anywhere else (it was in a plant conservatory). All the others can be installed in any other space.
There is something odd about ephemeral art, which I think speaks to one's "objectives" on art, and all the philosophies behind that.
Finally, I asked if the model was based on her. If the piece was a "self portrait." Again, she didn't know how to answer the question.
In any case, Kho continues with her art.