Y. M. Kwok

Rubber Factory is pleased to present Y. M. Kwok’s solo exhibition with the gallery titled Chromatic Elevations.

In Kwok’s latest body of work, grids of hand-cut photographic prints are assembled in a meditative process. Each work contains anywhere from ten to fifteen thousand individual prints totaling thousands of square feet.The repetitive staggering of materials come together to form a forceful exploration of surface, texture and tonality.

Architectural principles such as Mies van der Rohe’s notion of opacity reverberate and inform many of the optical experiments in the work. Rigid lines dissolve into fuzzy edges upon closer inspection, their porousness recalling the way Mies’ structures minimized the boundaries between the interiors of his buildings and exterior environments. Over the 3 year period of making these intricate pieces, Kwok worked from his office in a Mies building as he photographed the shimmering effects of sunlight reflecting off the tinted glass of the neighboring skyscrapers. The resulting images are a synthesis of nature and the man-made, forming an language of abstraction based on the modulation of colors and density.

As Kwok prints and dissects each image into incremental sections, the elements become discreet and pliable. Removing the image from their architectural index, Kwok converts them to studies of incrementalism. Instead of the industrial scale of architecture the work takes on the intimacy of the studio space as Kwok creates rhythmic interpretations of the grid. The imperfections of the edges belie the hand in the making of the work while the forms themselves become functionless symbols revealing the inner language of Kwok’s practice.

Y. M. Kwok was born in Hong Kong and is now based in Toronto. He received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Simon Fraser University and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Parsons School of Design.