Snake in a cookie jar
(2023)
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.
Produced during the Arnis Art Residency in Arnis, Germany, Island Shoals responds to the particular geography of Germany’s smallest city, situated on a narrow peninsula extending into the Schlei inlet. Formerly an island, Arnis was connected to the mainland in the 18th century, leaving a landscape where the distinction between island and mainland remains geographically and historically present.
Drawing on nautical charts and navigation markers, the work takes the form of an abstracted shoal buoy — a device normally used to signal shallow waters, submerged obstacles and navigational hazards. Positioned on the isthmus that now connects Arnis to the mainland, the marker offers neither a clear warning nor a route towards safe water. Instead, Island Shoals uses this ambiguous geography to consider the island as both refuge and enclosure: a place defined as much by the possibility of retreat as by separation from what lies beyond it.
Location
Seoul
Dates
2023
Materials
ngie
