October 28-December 1
The Amelia A. Wallace Gallery at the State University of New York at Old Westbury is hosting an art exhibition titled: “On the Street. The Extraordinary Vision of Sook Jin Jo,” curated by Amelia A. Wallace Gallery Director Hyewon Yi.
Sook Jin Jo is a multidisciplinary artist living in New York and of Korean descent. Since 1985, she has created art that inspires and creates awareness.
Her art includes diverse forms of art, such as drawings and sculptures. Jo also does performances, photographs, videos, installations, public artworks, and architecture with the approach of restoring humanity and reclaiming empathy and truth.
She had been the subject of thirty-five solo exhibitions. Some of her exhibitions are “Walter Gropius Mater Artist Series,” a collaboration with immigrants from Latin America that was exhibited in Virginia; “SeMA Gold 2014: Nobody“; and the contemporary art exhibition “Art Jeoji 2022,” exhibited in Korea.
The solo exhibition highlights recent photographic works, sculptures, and video documentation of her public projects and architectural work focusing on the circle of life and destruction.
The photos portray one hundred homeless people, representing the crude reality that some people experience on the streets of New York City.
The art exhibition also presents massive wooden assemblage sculptures. Those sculptures reflect the spiritual significance of discarded objects and fading ecosystems.
According to and article of The Korean Art Museum Association Museum website, Donald Kuspit, an American art critic and poet known for his practice of psychoanalytic art criticism, said, “Sook Jin Jo’s work is not “junk sculpture” in the ordinary sense,” and “there is nothing arbitrary and vulgar about Jo’s abstract compositions, as there is about the crude material found on the street… Jo has taken profane materials and created a sacred art.”
During the art exhibition, I felt extremely connected with the photographic work displayed because it reflected the inequality that is experienced in different cities around the world, especially in New York City, the capital of the world.
The colors and the paper used for the photographs were excellent. Sook Jin Jo impressed me with the quality of her photographs.
Her sculptures had many surfaces of carelessly painted dark colors on wooden supports. These flat surfaces combine to create abstract relief sculptures without a figurative content..
Sook Jin Jo’s art exhibit on the OW campus shows a diverse art style that will promote and inspire all visitors to the gallery to form their own opinions and interpretations of Jo’s body of work.
