MIMI JUNG

Tan Live Edge Forms, 2018

mohair, cotton, plywood + aluminum frame

44 x 30 x 2 inches

sold

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History Lessons :: Delphine Hennelly + Mimi Jung, Carvalho Park, Brooklyn, New York, February 8 - March 31, 2019

Mimi Jung alters the language of thread in a way that invites questions about the relationship of the geometric confines of weaving to formal vocabularies of abstract painting. Her work expands notions about the construction of pictorial abstraction to include the process of making and tactile experience. It is an understatement to say that Jung’s work successfully frees itself of the decorative character of textiles or the assumptions of what a woven work should be. Engaging the optics of painting, and the tactility and physicality of sculpture, the work is conceived of and exists in the vocabularies of contemporary art disciplines.

The loom holds its place in the conversation in the insistent geometry of Pink to Black Rectangles, with shapes parallel to the frame, referencing both edge and grid, set at intervals dictated by their own width – primary tenets of modernist painting, and particularly of minimalism. The rectangles both materialize and dematerialize in an expansive and magnetic visual field of continuous color. Tonal gradations – pink to black, black to pink – induce an arresting optical sensation, contrary to the rectangles’ flat, locked-in character. The resulting pulse engages theories of Op art, and in doing so, perceptual experience becomes part of the piece.

Surface texture is a palpable medium in Jung’s work. The delicate featheriness of mohair used in the weft tempers the work’s strong physicality. It is an active, seducing quality. Tactility is as expressive in Jung’s work as form and color, and as in Pink to Black Rectangles, the softness of the surface, paired with scale and palette, at once creates an immersive plane that also comes forth to envelope the viewer.

Jung’s Live Edge series abstracts the fixed notion of the grid and the persistent geometric language of the weave. The weft travels through the work with the quality of a drawn line, resulting in forms that are both fixed and fluid. Here Jung isolates the individual strands of the warp, inserting space between, lending the allusion of beams of light radiating between clouds, or in the case of Blush to Tan Ellipse, from the sun itself. The density of form against void, amplified by the surface’s pilosity, confuses the two-dimensionality of the woven plane, inviting a figure/ground division. The voids also lend a sculptural physicality, influencing and engaging the space around, through, and behind the work. The way in which Jung limns space prompts a reconsideration of the woven plane as screen or sculpture, and by exposing the inner structure of the work to affect light, Jung even touches upon architecture.