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.
Location
Seoul
Dates
2023
Materials
ngie
TAKE TEN takes the pink walls of Las Palmas Project Space as both material and proposition. Closely resembling Baker-Miller Pink — a colour controversially associated with calming aggressive behaviour — the existing architecture becomes the starting point for an investigation into colour as a purported tool for regulating mood, behaviour and wellbeing.
The exhibition traces this promise through a series of materials associated with soothing, healing or relief, including calamine, Himalayan salt, bismuth subsalicylate and cochineal pigment. Their apparent benignity is repeatedly complicated: cochineal requires the mass harvesting of insects; excessive exposure or consumption produces adverse effects; and the therapeutic claims surrounding Baker-Miller Pink remain disputed. Through sculpture, painting, textile and a continuously running fountain, TAKE TEN constructs an environment in which reassurance gradually becomes suspect, using humour and contradiction to question the impulse to package discomfort into something manageable, attractive and calm.
