Imi Hwangbo
Hannah Israel
Imi Hwangbo received a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a master of fine arts degree from Stanford University. She has received international artist fellowships at the American Academy in Rome and the Camargo Foundation in France. She was an artist in residence at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Hwangbo’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Volta Art Fair, the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, and the Miller Yezerski Gallery. Two-person and group shows include the Art on Paper Fair, the International Print Center New York, and the Bell Gallery of Brown University. Articles on her work have appeared in the Huffington Post, Art in America , the Boston Globe , and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . She is represented by the Ellen Miller Gallery in Boston. Artist’s Statement My work explores notions of desire through an expanded approach to drawing. The imagery is drawn from Korean decorative arts, with reference to an iconography of desire for harmony, longevity, fertility, and good fortune. My works are constructed with paper that is meticulously colored, hand-worked, and layered so that sculptural forms emerge. Evocative of the decorative arts, my works are alluring to the eye and highly crafted over the entire surface. Light is used as a medium to convey the image, with patterns gaining depth through the translucent layering of light and shadow. These works incorporate a sculpted negative space within the patterns, a void defined by the edges of cut paper. The edges of the works are where the image dissolves and becomes physically immaterial. As the image dematerializes both pictorially and physically, it suggests a moment where the real and the imagined intersect.
Hannah Israel lives and works in Columbus, Georgia. She received her master of fine arts degree in sculpture from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Israel has exhibited her work at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Vargas Museum of Art in the Philippines, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Honolulu, and the Krannert Art Museum, among others. She has received the Daedalus Art Grant (NYC), a creative and performance art fellowship at the University of Illinois, an artist’s fellowship at Cornell University, and the Banff Center scholarship, among others. She has also served as curator of numerous solo and group exhibitions. In November 2018, she was awarded the 2019 Blue Heron Nature Preserve Artist in Residence in Atlanta. Israel is currently a professor of art and the gallery director at Columbus State University. Artist’s Statement Hannah Israel draws beauty out of tangible and intangible materials as a poetic gesture that reflects the fragility of the world. Without a specific reference point, she investigates line, volume, texture, shape, and form. Israel is interested in using information as a form of abstraction. The nature of her work maps our relationships by illustrating how fragile time can be and the predictable nature of our experiences based on the world around us. Imagined language is the root of her work. She is fascinated by cultures that use the same symbols and patterns to create maps of their land and their dreams. This lack of distinction between fantasy and reality opens up the way we can think about our world.
Untitled (Forms)
Lepidoptera IV
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