Zdenek Kosek
Zari 1954, c.1991
Ballpoint pen, marker/paper
8.25 x 6 inches / 21 x 15.2 cm / ZKo 50
Soojin Cha
My Scar is a Pattern, 2005
Cotton, silk, cotton thread
129 x 51 inches / 327.75 x 129.5 cm / SCh 4
JANUARY 29 - FEBRUARY 28, 2009
Using art as a way of charting aspects of the universe is not a new idea. Neolithic stone carvings documented star charts and marks on wood or stone from ancient times documented the varied topographies, sacred and profane, of the planet. What the two artists in this exhibition have in common is that they use the material means of art making to chart and explore immaterial phenomena.
In the case of Zdenek Kosek, this is nothing more than the immediate moment of temporal existence and all things in this ever-present moment happen simultaneously, which he, in his own mindset, feels he is causing. The charts are documenting his tremendous affect upon the world. He specifically believes he can control the weather of the world and influence personal and political events.
For SooJin Cha, we see her meditations on the corporeal and non-corporeal effects on the human body of events like growth, injury, disease and healing. Kosek uses small scraps of paper for his maps, which he intricately and elaborately covers with words and symbols in highly activated gestural compositions. He does this to lay out phrases of conversation heard at the moment, birds he sees out the window, the light, the temperature-the way thoughts and physical phenomena interact. In short, he is drawing active diagrams of synaesthesia in pen and ink.
Cha uses cloth and incorporates jagged embroidery as a form of drawing. Her threads make marks, and those marks lead to revelations that reveal pain and healing. Her embroidery is not facile or pretty, in fact, as far as textile art goes, her work is transgressive. She does not let us forget that these ideas are on cloth but we don’t lose sight of the hand, loose and improvisatory in its drawings in thread.
SooJin Cha is from Seoul, Korea, and received her MBA from Ewha Womens University. Zdenek Kosek, from Czech Republic, is the quintessential art brut maker. Both sense profound physical and non-physical phenomena and speak a limbic language of survival and transcendence through their works.