The City of West Hollywood and its Arts & Cultural Affairs Commission—in collaboration with CMay Gallery—will install “Bus Stop” by internationally renowned Korean artist Yi Hwan-Kwon in West Hollywood Park next week. The mixed media work is Yi Hwan-Kwon’s first public art exhibition in the United States, and is part of “Art on the Outside,” the City’s ongoing public art program that installs temporary artworks on West Hollywood’s medians and in its parks.
On Thursday, March 24, from 4:30-5PM, there will be a special public reception to present the project, hosted by The City of West Hollywood and CMay Gallery— the artist, Yi Hwan-Kwon, will be in attendance. The reception will take place at the installation site, located on the concrete stage just north of the West Hollywood Library (625 N. San Vicente Boulevard, West Hollywood, 90069) and opposite the Pacific Design Center (PDC). Immediately following the reception, there will be an opening for Yi Hwan-Kwon’s solo show “Sight Lines” at CMay Gallery inside the PDC during designLAB from 5-9:30PM (http://www.cmaygallery.com/).
“Bus Stop” (127 x 57 x 22 inches) features nine hand-painted sculptures—a bus stop, a fire hydrant and seven unique “city” people, that have been stretched vertically, which disorients the viewer and encourages a moment of pause and reflection.
In an essay on Yi Hwan-Kwon’s work, Los Angeles based art critic Shana Nys Dambrot says, “In his illusionistic manipulations of the human body –as represented by an eclectic array of exemplar citizens both anonymous and archetypal—Yi Hwan-Kwon seeks to give durable physical form to a cluster of ideas about energy and cognition. Encountering his stretched, attenuated, truncated, squashed, yet otherwise realistic sculptures, often in unexpected public settings like parks and plazas, viewers frequently report feelings of ‘dizziness’ and ‘giddiness’ at being confronted with what are essentially beings from another plane of existence appearing as anomalies in our world. It’s like a curtain lifted on a parallel universe. It’s like straddling both sides of the looking glass. It’s a powerful metaphor for the divided state of the world we do inhabit, and for the joyfully transformative power of art.”
Image: studio shot of “Bus Stop”
