Elise Siegel and Mie Yim

Storefront Ten Eyck is delighted to present the work of Elise Siegel and Mie Yim, mid-career artists, whose work is primarily concerned with the human figure. To pair the sculpture of Elise Siegel and the painting of Mie Yim is to explore what it means to be human, specifically how we inhabit our bodies; what identities we assume; and how our emotions, thoughts and aspirations are expressed in images that reflect the nuances of the material and the sensitivity of their creators to the human condition. These two artists are masters of their respective mediums. Through a skillful manipulation of their materials and art historical sources, each arrives at striking, poignant representations of the human form as we seek to understand it in an age of digital representation and physical disconnection.

Elise Siegel’s ceramic portrait busts are inspired by figurative sculptures that appear to have had some cultural function, either in ritual or in daily life, in addition to their being creative expressions–objects that humans have empowered–idols, reliquaries, masks and even toys. They vary stylistically as well as in terms of scale, surface and glaze. Siegel has taken formal cues from the abstracted features and exaggerated forms of the Jomon dogu figures of Neolithic Japan, as well as the hollow eyes of terracotta Haniwah funeral figures from the 3rd to 6th century AD. For Siegel, these sculptures, everything from Renaissance reliquary busts to African masks, continue to resonate as their meaning evolves over time. Although each of Siegel’s sculptures is a distinct individual, they are not portraits of specific people. Rather, they are meant to embody a psychic state familiar to the viewer, allowing for a wide range of projections that reflect what the viewer brings to the encounter. The artist attempts to imbue the work with the immediacy of human experience and to find a way for each sculpture to project a sense of its own hidden life.

As a Korean-born immigrant, Mie Yim is interested in the intersection of Asian-pop visual culture and American post-war painting. Her paintings are portraits of animal-human hybrids, at times looming and solitary, at other times camouflaged and amalgamated. Ambiguities exist between distinctly rendered forms and areas comprised of paint on canvas. In Yim’s image world, the artist deploys a spectrum of jumbled, toy-like creatures and wise or self-possessed beings, like characters in an odd narrative who are visitors in a foreign land. The paintings conjure multiple associations ranging from evocative perversions, comic-book vulnerabilities, flirting violence, placid contentment and existential dread. The characters are staged so that they wrestle with all-too-human dramas filled with intense erotic desire and looming brutality. The artists writes, “As a child in Korea, I was weaned on Hello Kitty, Little Twin Stars and various other hopelessly cute dolls and fluffy animals. Later, as an art student in United States, I felt nourished by Philip Guston, Willem DeKooning and Italian Baroque painters like Caravaggio and Pontormo. Today, I like to imagine that if someone were to eat one of my paintings, it would taste sweet and sour and leave a perplexing, tangy aftertaste.”

Elise Siegel lives and works in New York City. She studied at the University of Chicago and completed a BFA at Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC. She has been actively exhibiting her work since arriving in New York in 1982. She has had solo exhibitions and completed major installations at venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Nancy Margolis Gallery, NYC; Garth Clark Project Space, Long Island City; Third World Ceramics Bienniale, South Korea; Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery: Jane Hartsook Gallery, NYC; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; Halsey Gallery of the College of Charleston, SC; and Laurie Rubin Gallery, NYC. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum at FIT, the Neuberger Museum and the Sculpture Center. Siegel has been the recipient of fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, has twice received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and is a 2014 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her work is in private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Arario Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; and the Chazen Museum in Madison WI.

Mie Yim was born in South Korea in 1963. She grew up in Hawaii, then moved to Philadelphia, earning a B.F.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art and spending a year at the Tyler School of Art program in Rome. Her work has been displayed in numerous international exhibitions including solo shows in 2004 at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York and the Galleria in Arco in Turin, Italy. She was one of the artists featured in Selections at the Drawing Center. Yim has been in group exhibitions at ATM Gallery, Michael Steinberg Fine Art, Feature, Inc., all in New York; Ise Cultural Foundation, New York; Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas; and Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina. She was awarded the AIM program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1991, as well as Jurors Award at N.Y.U. Gallery in 1993. Her work is in collections around the world including Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, and the Chambers Hotel in New York City. Currently, she lives and works in New York City.