Snake in a cookie jar
(2023)
Happily Ever After examines the relationship between optimism, apathy and the persistent idea of life as a linear progression towards resolution — a point at which everything finally falls into place. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, the exhibition considers hope, superstition and small gestures of reassurance as ways of navigating uncertainty, while questioning when these might also become forms of stasis.
Through a series of small-scale wall sculptures and a textile installation structured around the phases of the moon, Happily Ever After sets the promise of a definitive ending against cycles of growth, decline and renewal. Moving between humour, anxiety and hope, the exhibition asks what remains when the promise of ‘happily ever after’ gives way to a continuous process of beginning again.
Snake in a Cookie Jar considers colour as a strategy of concealment: a surface that attracts attention while simultaneously obscuring what it contains. Taking its title from the imagined discovery of a snake inside a cookie jar, the exhibition uses this deliberately absurd encounter to examine seduction as a form of misdirection, and the unstable boundary between attraction and threat.
Drawing on ‘snake detection theory’ — the hypothesis that aspects of human vision evolved in response to the presence of snakes — the exhibition connects colour and perception to more primal mechanisms of attention, fear and survival. Across painting, textile and sculpture, colour operates less as decoration than as a lure: intensifying visibility while complicating what, exactly, is being seen.
Location
Seoul
Materials / media
ngie
Dates
2023
Happily Ever After examines the relationship between optimism, apathy and the persistent idea of life as a linear progression towards resolution — a point at which everything finally falls into place. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, the exhibition considers hope, superstition and small gestures of reassurance as ways of navigating uncertainty, while questioning when these might also become forms of stasis.
Through a series of small-scale wall sculptures and a textile installation structured around the phases of the moon, Happily Ever After sets the promise of a definitive ending against cycles of growth, decline and renewal. Moving between humour, anxiety and hope, the exhibition asks what remains when the promise of ‘happily ever after’ gives way to a continuous process of beginning again.
Happily Ever After examines the relationship between optimism, apathy and the persistent idea of life as a linear progression towards resolution — a point at which everything finally falls into place. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, the exhibition considers hope, superstition and small gestures of reassurance as ways of navigating uncertainty, while questioning when these might also become forms of stasis.
Through a series of small-scale wall sculptures and a textile installation structured around the phases of the moon, Happily Ever After sets the promise of a definitive ending against cycles of growth, decline and renewal. Moving between humour, anxiety and hope, the exhibition asks what remains when the promise of ‘happily ever after’ gives way to a continuous process of beginning again.