“From afar, Hong Seon Jang’s sculptural cityscapes look like models from a city planner’s office. But upon closer inspection, we can see that eachrising building and skyscraper is capped with a letter of the alphabet! The mini metropolises are in fact meticulously arranged conglomerations of disused typesets.
Jang’s Type City is part of a solo show of the artist’s work at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, Colorado. The letterpress and wood sculpture stretches just two feet by 11 inches, but rises to 14 inches. Despite the small volume, a massive amount of tinydisused metal pieces were used to build up the incredible relief.
Type City offers a birds-eye view of a city by the sea. Jang has used the letterpress pieces to create the city’s shoreline, complete with long docks that jut into the water. Grids of streets and low apartment buildings and business are made from small pieces, or longer ones places horizontally. Clusters of skyscrapers spring up in the “downtown” area near the water’s edge. The longer pieces stand up vertically, and the raised letters on their roofs give away their former use.
Type City’s incredible detail harkens the era of miniaturists, which coincidentally are related to the era when letterpresses were commonly used to print newspapers, books and other reading materials. Jang ironically uses the remnants from an obsolete vintage process to create the sprawling metropolis of modern times.”
“Type City is a recent artwork by artist Hong Seon Jang that uses pieces of movable type from a printing press to create an elaborate cityscape. It’s fascinating to watch as the need for printed books and typography wanes, the unused objects themselves are more frequently used as an actual medium….”
Editions ’12
Exhibition Opening and Catalogue Launch
Thursday, May 10, from 6-8 pm | Exhibition on view May 10 – July 8, 2012
With a catalogue essay by Roberta Waddell, a renowned print expert and former Curator of Prints at the New York Public Library, the catalogue and exhibition feature new works created by recipients of the Printshop’s Special Editions and Publishing Residencies: Hong Seon Jang, Jennie C. Jones, Darina Karpov, David Kramer, and Enoc Perez.
“The Hong Seon Jang’s Labyrinth exhibition at the David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, Colorado, showcases two unique collections curated specifically for the show, as well as a selection of his other work.
The New York-based artist traditionally forgoes the use of the usual artist’s materials of choice in favor of reworking mundane, man-made objects.
The ‘Black Forest’ collection, which Jang created as part of the exhibition, features multiple layers of overlapping, translucent tape pasted onto a black chalkboard. He makes another interesting material choice in his ‘Black Ruin’ project, which is also part of his solo show. By gingerly placing hot glue across a canvas, the artist adds flair to his work. Both of these projects fuse man with nature through the use of non-natural materials used to convey the environment which the artist is inspired by.”
“designboom has received an exclusive sneak peak of new york city-based artist hong seon jang’s upcoming solo show at david b. smith gallery in denver, colorado, USA. the exhibition is an assemblage of jang’s mixed-media sculptures and includes his tape drawings, decorated thread sculptures and a miniature cityscape formed from letterpress pieces. the artist’s elaborate installations transform every-day objects into actualizations that evoke both natural and man-made scenes.
in his tape drawing ‘black forest’, jang layers a typically transparent item until a ghostly wooded alcove is manifested upon a black chalkboard. with ‘black mirage’, the artist uses clear string, zig-zagging across the gallery space, to create the framework for darkened hot glue to adhere to. the effect is something like a man-made moss, growing upon the walls of the installation. again in ‘type city’, the artist re-imagines mass-produced materials, playing with the objects’ initial forms in order to create a whimsical, diminutive metropolis reminiscent of his new york city home.”
We are pleased to announce an in-depth feature of Hong Seon Jang in the Spring 2012 issue of Modern In Denver magazine. The piece chronicles aspects of Jang’s practice and covers many of his most ambitious works to date. This feature sets the stage for his upcoming exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery, which will include a new series of Jang’s acclaimed tape drawings and mixed-media sculptural works. In addition, the artist will be in residence at the gallery for a week completing two largescale site-specific installations. This exhibition of new works will open May 4th, 2012.
The article can be read in its entirety by visiting the Modern in Denverwebsite.
In The Denver Post, Ray Mark Rinaldi states, “The David B. Smith Gallery is on a roll, and its new show features the drawings of Christina Empedocles, who makes odd and evocative works with wax pencils. Empedocles’ subject matter crosses a lot of lines, from pop culture movie posters to natural subjects like birds and zebras. But she brings it all together with the consistent precision of her renderings and her own personal twist. She crinkles, tears and cuts out in a way that makes you rethink the time and place where familiar objects exist….”
David B. Smith Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition, Gregory Euclide: Nature Out There, opening at the Nevada Museum of Art on March 24 and running through September 2, 2012. The exhibition features a comprehensive set of six works which illustrate critical aspects of Euclide’s stunning oeuvre, and the museum will also introduce Euclide’s largest and most ambitious self-contained work to date, the spectacular, What kept you at bay allowed me to feel this way. From Euclide’s provocation regarding art historical notions of landscape and materiality to his raising topics of conservation and modernity, these works represent the dynamic visual breadth of the artist’s practice while revealing the topical currents that run throughout.
What kept you at bay allowed me to feel this way and selected works from Gregory Euclide: Nature Out There are available for acquisition. Please contact David B. Smith Gallery with any inquiries.
From the Nevada Museum of Art:
Reno, Nevada – Artist Gregory Euclide’s intricately crafted sculptural works, on view at the Nevada Museum of Art March 24 through September 2, 2012, explore the tension between idealized, picturesque views of landscapes and actual experiences of being in nature. Using traditional methods of landscape painting combined with natural materials and found objects, Euclide constructs three dimensional encapsulated worlds where pristine notions of landscape meet the reality of our current environment.
Gregory Euclide is an artist and teacher living in the Minnesota River Valley. He received his MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Euclide was awarded two Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants through the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Jerome Foundation Residency through the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary. This November, Euclide was a recipient of the 2011-12 Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Emerging Artists.
Euclide’s work was featured in Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape at MASS MoCA (March 2008-April 2009) and was recently included in the exhibition Otherworldly at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. His work is also featured on album covers of the 2012 Grammy award-winning musical group Bon Iver. Euclide’s work is currently on view in the exhibition Small Worlds at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.
Gregory Euclide: Nature Out There will be exhibited March 24 through September 2, 2012 at the Nevada Museum of Art, Donald W. Reynolds Center for the Visual Arts, E. L. Wiegand Gallery located at 160 West Liberty Street in downtown Reno. For more information, please call 775.329.3333 or visit the Nevada Museum of Art webstite.
Liz Miller: “Recalcitrant Mimesis” at David B. Smith Gallery
art ltd. Magazine, Michael Paglia
March/April 2012, p. 31
“….To celebrate its opening,the Clyfford Still Museum partnered with select regional museums and galleries to present shows that pay homage to Still. Most of these exhibits focus on abstract painting, which makes Liz Miller’s “Recalcitrant Mimesis” at the David B. Smith Gallery the most unusual of the lot in that it’s anchored by a spectacular and monumental installation….”
