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

Trap, Bird, Ball continues an interest in extracting narratives from unstable or incomplete images. Forms initially developed through processes of enlargement and visual distortion were translated into sculptures whose function remains deliberately uncertain.

Installed together, the works operate almost performatively: part trap, part game, part stage set. Objects appear to anticipate an action that never fully takes place, suggesting rules, movements and encounters without defining them. The installation becomes a suspended scenario, where meaning is produced through expectation and the possibility that something is about to happen.