Jane Lombard Gallery is thrilled to present Jack, Sean Shim-Boyle’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition debuts his latest work including two ambitious installations that intensify the artist’s use of peculiar architectural interventions. The sculptures draw on mythology and fables to develop parallels between the fictional conditions considered in those stories and their pervasion into our self-identity and consciousness.
In Jack, Shim-Boyle maneuvers, warps and internalizes the distinguished iconography of “Jack and the Beanstalk” culminating in elaborate constructions that solicit an amalgamation of the principles put forth in the known tale with one’s own familiarities and efficacy. Shim-Boyle weaves the visual narrative with his personal state of being as a bi-racial Korean-Canadian. The story becomes a vehicle through which the artist explores his biography; Jack who perilously thieves his new way of living and Shim-Boyle, like many 1.5 and second-generation individuals, who must precariously grab on and assimilate to multiple identity systems.
The installations engage elusive anxieties of belonging – states of non-conformity in cultural, political, and physical limbos – through the various movements and sounds encountered. The Beanstalk wire is erratic and assertive, dangerous and alluring. Mother! Mother! is a slice of a simultaneously collapsing and newly built domestic setting, bringing together the nurturing quality of wood block toys and bright colors with the frantic language and unexpected trembling from the industrial paint mixer beside it. Fee Fi Fo Fum uses a motion activated sliding door and mirror mechanism resulting in an echo-chamber of lustrous vanity, endless movement and futile self-awareness.
In amplifying the fear and comfort of unsettled objects, spaces and bodies, Shim-Boyle addresses the fatigue of self-actualization during political uncertainty while asserting the useful mutability and reinvention available in unresolved circumstances.
