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
There is a Gorilla on Mars takes as its starting point a widely circulated image from NASA’s Spirit rover in which a small rock formation was read as the figure of a gorilla. The image became convincing precisely through its poor quality: magnification, compression and distance stripped the object of definition, allowing perception to fill in what the image could no longer clearly describe.
The work extends this logic through found digital images, isolating and enlarging fragments until their original subjects become unstable or abstract. These fragments are then translated back into drawings and sculptures, moving from object to image and back to object again. Rather than reconstructing a lost original, the process produces a new one: a physical form generated through error, projection and misrecognition. The work approaches looking as an almost forensic act — searching images for clues, building narratives from incomplete evidence, and testing the point at which perception slips between recognition and invention.