Myeongsoo Kim & Jessie Rose Vala

Present Company opens its 2017-18 season with Dusk to Dust, a two-person exhibition featuring site-specific installation and sculptures by Myeongsoo Kim and video, sound works, and sculptures by Jessie Rose Vala.

Kim and Vala employ a metaphorical lens to empower a reciprocal inquiry into the elemental connections between the interior/personal and the exterior/universal. Through an architectural intervention, the gallery space transforms into a suite of micro and macro experiences that augment each artist’s connection to temporality and its growing ephemera. These artistic approaches unpack a discovery of place and an engagement with materials, as much as it aggregates mysticism, the illumination of perception, and mankind’s dystopian hand.

Myeongsoo Kim collects, hoards even, scavenged fragments of detritus that are meticulously reconfigured by studious craft and precision into refined, ambiguous shrines of memory and mythology. These accumulated objects and images, facilitated by the march of geologic time, become imbued with ever shifting symbolic nuance. Presented as non sequitur collections and fetishized curios, these visual containers strike the fine balance between celebrating the resurrection of discarded materials and the transient connotations of memento mori.

Jessie Rose Vala employs totemic sculptural objects and ritualized performances of, on and about the sacrosanct soils of the western landscape. Vala’s nonlinear narratives depict the ceremonial redemption of sacred places spoiled by human intervention and historical residue. By constructing personally derived rituals, the artist questions if the tumult of technology will someday project a vision of natural order back onto the dust.

Myeongsoo Kim (born 1980, Korea) received his BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2009, and his MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2011. His work has been exhibited across the United States, including shows at Sculpture Center in New York, Still House in Brooklyn, Bodega in Philadelphia, Jack Chiles in New York, and most recently, a solo show at Roomservice Gallery in Brooklyn. Myeongsoo lives and works in Brooklyn where he runs an artist space and studio, Top Top LLC, with his friends.

Jessie Rose Vala (born 1977, Madison, WI) is an American installation artist who has been exhibited her work nationally and internationally over the past decade. She received an MFA from University of Oregon and a BFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. Vala is also part of the collaboration Light Hits, where she creates installations, music, and videos with the artist Kelie Bowman. In 2014 Vala started Ungrund Collective, a collaboration between five, female contemporary artists working within similar humanistic inquiries.