Con Artist Collective and Gallery on the Lower East Side is currently presenting its 2017 Fall Residency show featuring a selection of outstanding work by five artists working with various types of medium. This year’s participating artists are Michelle Kim, Joe Arnold, Brianna Olson, and AnnaLeena Prykari, and Seunghwi Koo who has been chosen to be “Artist of the Week” at Artfinder.com.
Koo presents several mixed media installations mostly revolving around pigs. Notable pieces on view include Piggies #21 and Red People which are mixed media collages of small and colorful figurines of the animal grouped together. There are also several other installations of hers around the gallery such as a cloud with pigs floating on and around it, a pig at the top of the Empire State Building, and a couple of pigs gathered near a slice of pizza and a can of Pepsi representing Koo’s lunch.
For Koo, the pig has been an influential creature as her father owned a butcher shop in Korea and saw several of the animals butchered. In Eastern culture, the pig is used in celebratory occasions where its head is placed in the center of the room while money is shoved in its mouth. In Western culture, however, the pig carries the negative connotations of greed, disgust, and selfishness.Michelle Kim specializes in photography and imaging whose subjects include still-lifes, portraits, and individuals going about their daily lives in the cities of New York and Seoul where she splits her time. For this show, she presents a collection of photographs entitled Synonyms for Memory that depict her memories with her family and events that took place in cities including her native Seoul.
Joe Arnold is an interdisciplinary artist and photographer based in Brooklyn who specializes in Lens-Based Arts. Arnold’s work explores imaging the gay male persona and masculine identity and seeks to understand what it means to look at and consume the image of the gay male body. For this show, he presents two large-scale photographs entitled Inferno I & II depicting extreme close-ups of clothing materials such as silk and fur coats.
Brianna Olson specializes in video art and has directed several music videos. However, for this show, she presents a couple of mixed media installations such as the symmetrical Hablame, which features two large earrings shape like owls with blue diamonds, and below are two small skeleton figures with two light-green diamond studded snakes below. The piece is sparkly and aligned with jewels and a large opening in the middle reveals a background of dried rose petals.
AnnaLeena Prykari presents And We Never Happened Sequence 1 & 2 which she describes as “an ongoing love letter for mental illness.” Three stacks of this work are presented on large papers toward the front of the gallery creatively wrapped in colorful yarn. One of the stacks includes free copies to take home. The piece includes lines such as “I medicate you to be balanced” and “We use mixed messages, flirt, play, hard to catch, Bound me or not.”
At Con Artist Collective and Gallery, 119 Ludlow St., through Oct. 20. The gallery is open Mon.-Sat. from 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
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