EXHIBITED WORKS
Video Room, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound
Where in the World is Botero's Leg
by Jonathan Ching
July 9 - Aug. 2, 2010
The Persistence of Memory*
The history of remembering reveals how memory is constructed, socially and conceptually. While one may readily associate the term 'memory' with the post-Industrial Revolution and the Information Age, with digital technology's capacity to store increasingly massive amounts of information, the ways in which we choose to recall are not always automatic nor absolute, shaped as they are by our perceptions, and colored by our interpretations. In the end, remembering remains a largely subjective and personal process: this was underscored by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who recalled the Spanish recordar (to remember) as being rooted in the Latin re-cordis: to pass back through the heart.
Jonathan Ching's current solo show, entitled Where in the World is Botero's Leg, engages the fallibility and arbitrary beauty of human memory. Framed by our own vantage points—our respective experiences, politics, and ways of seeing the world—singular events may very well end up documented as intersecting memories and narratives, multiple accounts of the past. He constructs the exhibit as a dissection of this concept, through a seemingly random conjugation of paintings and sculptures, where images are sifted out from their previous contexts and juxtaposed as visual bullet points to his discussion of the subject.
The strength of Ching's shows lies in their disparate relationships, seemingly arbitrary yet all interconnected. Instead of repeating the theme by producing variations of one work, he engages ideas as separate visual concepts or series of works, capable of standing alone yet challenging viewers to discover connections between the images populating the gallery space.
Ching elaborates on the concept of memory as a generally analog construction. In the work entitled Memorex Are Made of These, for instance, he consciously resurrects the image of dated cassette tapes in this time of DVDs and optic fiber technologies. As a tool for storage and retrieval of data, such cassette tapes would now be considered obsolete, unreliable, and prone to defects. Such, too, is the case with our recollections. This implied point is verbally alluded to in the work's title and visually extended in Ching's inclusion of a time-worn sofa set and a family pet into the composition—elements that are too familiar yet too recent to be considered as relics or artifacts for posterity.
Ching also seems to contemplate on the physicality of loss in the work entitled Shopping with Botero's Leg: a four-piece work composed of three paintings of various boots and shoes (from dainty Oriental shoes masking the pained practice of foot binding to specimens from the Wild West and wilder chaos of Hollywood) and copper relief leg appropriated from the abundantly carnal works of Colombian artist Fernando Botero, framed by decorative rays produced by the santo-makers of Catholic religious sculptures in Tayuman. Ching juxtaposes otherwise disparate elements and threads through the relationships between space and object: the absence of the foot is marked by the expanse within the shoes. The use of the copper rays, whether to underscore the posterity of flesh or its idolatry, is a visual device linking back to his earlier solo show on shared histories, entitled When the Saints Go Marching In.
The artist's works for this show also make use of extensive animal symbolism: black swans, a lone crow, bleeding goats, a dog slumbering on the sofa, clay birds, black metal swans and desolate whales. Often, these are utilized as emblems in Ching's series of oblong-shaped canvases in the show, which delves into “random memory and myth-making”, as he terms it. In Two Rivers, for instance, Ching's depiction of twin goats bleeding from the heart draws across several sources for images and inspiration: Christian symbolism, pagan iconographies, and 80's music. In contrast, the work entitled What Remains is a straightforward requiem for passings/departures: the bones of what once existed, vibrantly, are now excavated relics or forgotten trophies.
Ching draws on the image of the whale in Flight of the Zeppelin, constructing both the massive marine mammal and the antiquated war machine as symbols for doomed giants: considered as the infallible kings of the skies and seas yet often ending up in a tragic demise. For this work, Ching draws inspiration from Hokusai's woodblock wave prints, imbueing the seascape with a tangible sense of movement through a new medium (oil). Linking back to a previous show in 2008, Whalesongs for the Disenchanted, Flight of the Zeppelin echoes the earlier show's theme of disenchantment and disillussionment, which often comes with the act of recollecting the past.
This time, this sense of ominous, impending doom is magnified in what is arguably the darkest work in the show, entitled Pain's Grey. Here, the image of an unknown figure in bondage, tied to railroad tracks, lies in the direct path of an approaching train: a scene that could speak of either ominous, approaching doom—something impending, and anticipated in a terrible way—or the final memory of a tragedy before the final black out. Shall Ching's explorations into the theme stop with this work? This is a question which only future shows by this introspective artist can answer. ###
* Apologies to Salvador Dali
article by Lisa Ito
photo documentation by Jay Estaris of Skyfire Studios
http://www.jonching.com
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