Snake in a cookie jar
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
Shown during PARALLEL VIENNA in 2019 with
There Is An Elephant In This Room (2019) is formed by 5 textile panels that, when joined together to form a single larger panel, measures 2.40 x 4.5 m – the same measurements of an average sized male adult Asian Elephant. This work was based on the English language expression, “the elephant in the room”, which refers to a highly obvious problem that no one is willing to address. It was executed following the simple premise of hiding the outline of the animal in plain sight, in a room that has the exact same height as the average Asian Elephant – 2.40m. Different abstract patterns are seen on the back of each panel in order to mislead the viewer into overlooking the elephant. The Asian elephant has been listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1986.
