autumn ahn
artworks
exhibitions
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info
My research investigates practical forms, structures, and systems that organize human interactions with nature, such as windows, clocks, maps, astronomy, dreaming rituals, landscaping, and more. I am interested in the role of art to reestablish a sense of open-endedness to meaning and the structures we live with through the abstraction of familiar forms and processes that are accompanied by the symbolic or emotional charge of time. Experimenting with unconventional strategies through sculptural construction and representation, I include temporality in the production of my work, often resulting in objects and installations that exist in varying degrees of duration or sensitivity. My artworks transpire and collapse with the wind, move with the sun, hang from one another, or are shaken by a vibrational response to the environment.
My work explores how the physical body encounters landscapes and asks what kind of landscapes we are seeing or not seeing. I am thinking about porous boundaries that influence how forms materialize in time and space. For example, the horizon, which is a phenomena resulting from the meeting of the earth and atmosphere that we have brought into language with graphic line. What if this line was put back into space? Recently, this has inspired my work presenting sculptural encounters that reveal fluctuations away from stillness in the art object. Working from materials such as metal, paper, and stone in contact with various natural forces, such as oxidation, light, gravity, movement of the human body, or the wind, I am looking to the immediacies of material and sensory life.
Thinking about these encounters, I am led to consider the non-linear origins of our becoming and the physical or historical continuum that shapes and reshapes our realities. The abstraction I am working with is organized by my broad questions about what connection these elements have to liberatory experiences of time. What might performance be beyond the body? For these reasons, I work with experimentation to engage the limits of what my physical body can offer, translating this index of practice to the process, and ultimately seeing forms emerge from those parameters as a kind of map of this generative process.
Interested in expanding my current practice, which examines these dynamics between lived experience and embodiment, I use drawing as a tool to consider the dimensions of these ambiguities through what I imagine can be a conceptual practice of timekeeping. Using techniques developed in my performance work, observation and mark-making come together to navigate this continuum of structure, where material forms and their contours become events unearthed by shared space and shared time.
I am currently teaching a new class on Experimental Drawing as a foundation for philosophical thinking through visual art and I find myself returning to deep questions about what a surface is, what the boundaries of disciplines represent, about the consumption of material, and the dire state of critical thinking. As I teach these students, I am informed by my own fascination with line upended from its legible two-dimensional form. I imagine these graphic forms returning to space. I expand the drawings back into the landscape from which it came through. In the traditions of trying to capture the ‘landscape’ I refer back to the conventions of Western painting where lines are in fact edges built between the meeting of colors and atmospheres, or in Eastern painting, where the spareness of material makes room for the vast spiritual encounter held by the observation.
I am currently thinking through these terms of spareness and formation. Their metaphorical power allows for the contemplation of ambiguity derived from multitudes in meaning. I am inspired by the ambition of the human consciousness to make sense of the world around it and its own existence through art-making.
My artwork is a compass to reveal diffusions of all that is not the material itself as within the animation of the work, to expand upon the idea of embodiment and the energetic practice of creation. This is a response to the presence of uncertainty in our world today, but that sits deep within the soul of humanity. Time then becomes a vast project without predisposed parameters like that of material.
This process incorporating mark-making, sculpture, installation, and the immaterial world comes together in my research to investigate the spatial and bodily dimensions of form - its potent relationship to change. In order to do this work well, becoming fully aware of the surrounding environment - geographically, seasonally, emotionally, physiologically, plays a very important role in catalyzing this idea of movement and space. My abstraction requires that it takes into consideration these conditions of dislocation and relocation. It is a kind of abstraction that is only possible when the concrete is still a future concern.
In his book, “The Scent of Time,” Korean-German philosopher, Byung Chul Han, describes the contemporary world in temporal crisis, where ‘symptoms of temporal dispersal’ lead to ‘Time [that] is lacking a rhythm that would provide order.’ He analyzes that due to this dispersal, ‘no experience of duration is possible…[that] Life is no longer embedded in any ordering structures or coordinates that would found duration’ and therefore ‘we become radically transient ourselves.’ Thus, in a world where Time is scattered, atomized, and spinning from a lack of gravity, how can we reconcile or transmute these upended conditions? In my practice, I propose to begin with the body and its senses, which involve material and immaterial sensitivities, as a tool from which to examine these complex and evolving forces. My practice considers the possibility that presence becomes a means of navigating these sublimated hierarchical structures or circumstances. In doing so, I see material forms and their contours as events - offering feedback from the activity of exchange and returning continually to the body that tethers us to this material life.
In this context, drawing is an active mode of seeing, connecting, documenting, and marking time. Between body, mind and environment, presence becomes an active technique for this relational demand in the work. The physical marks of my encounters with material, and those I make visible through drawing, become metaphors of keeping time and world - offering a system of translation akin to that which one might read from the rings embedded in the core of a tree. How we mark surfaces or make maps of them, is one way we tell time.
Relevant to my observations around upheaval and the construct of time, I collaborated last year with astrophysicists and researchers at University of Chicago and Yerkes Observatory to chart the path of the stars from ancient Korea, where some historians believe exists the first star chart recorded in human history. The collaborative research was part of an award designed to bring together scientists and artists. It revealed a level of fascination we share across disciplines in the abstract and fundamental questions of human existence. Along the way, the development and instrumentation of tools and the science of astronomy has inspired new language within my practice to reconcile ideas of the terrain and the cosmos already in my work. I imagine this experience will continue to inspire my work for years to come.