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

The Closer You Look, the Better You Look developed from a single found image of a family on holiday at the beach. As the image was enlarged, its low resolution began to dissolve familiar forms: bodies, objects and gestures became ambiguous, and details appeared to shift into something else. These visual fragments became the basis for a series of drawings and sculptures that translated digital distortion back into physical form.

The work reflects an ongoing interest in looking as a speculative, almost forensic process. Zooming in becomes a way of searching for evidence, constructing narratives from incomplete information and testing how much meaning can be projected onto an image once certainty begins to break down.