Yeon Ji Yoo
Smell of Dust
by
Yeon Ji Yoo
Please join us for our first public reception!
Thursday, July 1st
5-7pm
Meet the artist, make new friends, enjoy some snacks and a drink.
Followed with live music by Tom Bailey
On view through August 6
To enter the space of Yeon Ji Yoo's art is to climb a stairway into borrowed memories, moving through dreamscapes of forests thick with entangled narratives and nostalgia. This space is a meeting place where life and death touch and trade places, unfolding us into differently-ordered words of sense.
A native of South Korea, Yeon Ji immigrated to the United States with her family in 1982, most of her knowledge of this mother country and the rural farmland she was born on are locked in memories from my childhood. As a result, Yeon Ji's work today is indelibly marked by the remembrances and the childlike awe which shaped them.
Living most of her life thereafter in New York City, Yeon Ji is trying to maintain connections to her early upbringing, finding parallels to those strong ties in new ones she would develop through her formative years. With imagery grounded in the visions from her youth, she is building a body of work tied together, by the delicate (yet dependable) and robust (yet fickle) bonds that make and break us at our cores.
After earning her B.F.A. at the Cooper Union, Yeon Ji became an arts educator. In 2005, she earned her M.F.A. in New Forms at the Pratt Institute then an M.S. in Environmental Science at the College of Staten Island in 2007. She continues my personal and artistic pursuit in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
https://www.yeonjiyoo.com/