Lecture - Temporal displacements and spatial constellations

Jin-me Yoon, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University

Jin-me Yoon's lens-based work in photography, video and installation explores questions concerning history and place supported by her underlying interest in the formation of the subject and subjectivities. Most recently, Yoon has been experimenting with displacing the vertical, bi-pedal way we typically move through the world by giving it a horizontal orientation. Lying on a moving platform, she has been performing lateral explorations ("crawling") for the camera through cities, towns and sites that differ in their geography, history and culture. Through the sculptural use of plastic and multiple cameras, her latest work in Mexico City and Nagoya commences her interest in the line between living matter and inert matter and the body's thingness as a material entity.

This artist talk will review her earlier work from the 1990s to her current work pulling the conceptual threads that link them together. For example, in staging performances for the camera - often using her own body as a sign of difference and more recently, evidence of an embodied corporality - Yoon investigates the distinction between memorialization and monumentalization as one line of inquiry.

For the past two decades, Jin-me Yoon has been staging performative actions for the camera - often using her own body as a sign of difference and more recently, evidence of an embodied corporality - setting into associative motion the complexities of our current conditions of accelerated globalization. Her latest body of work in cities - Seoul, Beppu, Nagoya, Vancouver, Vienna, and Mexico City - further extends her interest in the interconnectedness of history, materiality and the mutable properties of time and space with a particular emphasis on horizontality of the body as a generative form to question progress. Yoon teaches studio courses and seminars in both the undergraduate Visual Art program and the MFA graduate program at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. Her work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions locally, nationally and internationally. Her most current projects include, Beneath, produced in Vienna to be exhibited this summer 2012 at the Vancouver Art Gallery and a project in Mexico City to be highlighted in a series of solo exhibitions this year in Mexico, organized by the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City. Jin-me Yoon will be launching her Montreal Premiere of As It Is Becoming (Seoul, Korea), as part of Art Souterrain, February 25 to March 11, 2012.

Additional information

When: Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 10:30 a.m.

Where:
York Amphitheatre (EV 1.605)
Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Complex
1515 Ste-Catherine West, Montreal

Free admission. Everyone welcome. 

This artist talk is made possible by the Ethnocultural Art Histories Research Group (EAHR) sponsored by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, with the additional support of the Department of Art History at Concordia University.