Helen Cho, Space Silence. Installation view at Audain Gallery, 2020. Photo: Blaine Campbell.
Helen Cho: Space Silence
January 16 – March 14, 2020
Audain Gallery
Drawing from poetry, science fiction and the theories of Charles Darwin, Helen Cho uses materials of mass production and everyday environs to query relationships between life, death and return. Her videos and sculptures in Space Silence observe the sentience of all beings as they persist through states of transition.
This exhibition presents the first two chapters of a video trilogy that bears witness to the life of Tai Lam, a Vietnamese man based in Toronto by way of an Indonesian refugee camp. While rooted in the harrowing experiences of war and flight from it, these moving image works document the rituals of a life where need is no longer the structuring force of his days. These stories are complemented by a new video that further investigates Cho's practice of witnessing. In following the musings and murmurings of an elderly woman facing the end of her life, Cho builds up a web of relations that conjoins allusions to Korean shamanic traditions with sculptures that call for activation. Across these works, the sounds, places and materials of daily existence are construed as testimonies to resilience and ephemerality.
Space Silence also includes still-life compositions that draw from the Korean traditions of pyung-sang, which are low wooden platforms familiar in outdoor social spaces and variously used to convene around or as support structures; folk-style chaekgeori, which are images associated with auspicious meanings, symbolizing the desire for a happy life; and suseok, which are naturally occurring rocks that are collected for their aesthetic and symbolic value. Collectively, these sculptural forms ask how our affective responses anchor themselves in material, and how these responses are challenged through mimicry.
Helen Cho is a Toronto based artist whose practice spans sculpture, video, performance, drawing, text and photography, and draws from translations of language, tradition and the sites and materials of everyday habits. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK) and has exhibited internationally.
The attendant reading room includes materials loaned from SFU Library.
Curated by cheyanne turions
Events
CANCELLED: Opening Reception
Wednesday, January 15, 6 – 8pm
Audain Gallery
Conversation: Helen Cho and Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Saturday, February 22, 2pm
Audain Gallery
Workshop: Plant Meditation with Blackberry
Facilitated by Gina Badger
Registration is required. Please email audaingallery@sfu.ca
Sunday, February 23, 1 – 2:30pm
Audain Gallery
Workshop: THIS IS HOW DISTANT I AM: A WORKSHOP INTERSECTING THE WORKS OF HELEN CHO, THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA'S DICTEE, AND THE SELF ABOLISHED THROUGH THE WRECKAGE OF CONTEXT
Facilitated by Danielle LaFrance
Registration is required. Please email audaingallery@sfu.ca
Wednesday, March 4, 6 – 8pm
Audain Gallery
Support Material
