photos by Marc Hérbert _ “popkorn” by Julie Han Concourse Gallery group show, October 24-31 The word is missing a letter. One wonders if it has been misspelled or if it is a deliberate ploy. Where has it fled to, the ‘h’ of homelands, hearts, and heroes? An Unexibition. It rolls off the tongue and limps ashore, where we find it not so foreign after all. The absent ‘h’ swayed in silence from the very beginning. Will it be missed? Will anyone notice? Prefix ‘un’ as in, "this is an exibition but it is not..." The word unravels and folds inside out. What you see is what you don't. Identity. What of it? Locating Identity is a bottomless quest the can stifle even the most blessed of crusaders. The subtitle here foreshadows distance, difficulty, incompletion - an epic saga whose long awaited finale ends deliberately with a "to be continued" stapled to the finish. Around and around it goes; where it lives, is yet unknown. The image of identity is as flux as oceans. For some, like Julie Jung-Won Lee, whose sculptural self-portrait inhabits the exhibition foyer, identity is a living, breathing, growing grey space caught between the polarity of black and white worlds. A suggestion that identity can be conflictual is else- where evident in the confrontational pose of Kwan Yu's self-portrait. Simmering in red, it finds a strate- gic place within the gallery space, leering down from where everybody passing through the gallery is unfree from engagement. It remains to be said, however, that in Unexibition, not all selections deal directly with issues of identity. Most connections are understandably indirect. Engaging identity does not require one to solely do work about it. Immersion into a mélange of artworks that criss-cross various by T} Anzai schools and disciplines can no doubt have a tenden- cy to produce multiple meanings, echoes, and reverberations. The deception of evidence planted is use- less unless it is found. If there is a feeling of incom- pleteness to the package, it is perhaps the result of someone's idea to make it that way. SoRa Chung, who helped organize the exhibit, sought a way to informalize the show as a means to open and bring two parts together. The resulting consensus was that the exhibition didn't want to be an exhibition, hence the prefix and a purposeful misspelling. The end is not the end, and Unexibition is not an exhibition. Not in the usual sense, that is. Consider it a gathering of works, where a commu- nal identity blueprints the skeleton of the show. The body still floats like ether. Remember that the world, too, is incomplete, regardless of charts, maps, and satellites. It must first be taken apart to be put back together. So then, the rest is up to...whom? Sometimes, those who don't say much usually have the most to say. If for some reason a person, group, entity is left unheard, it falls upon the rest of us to become mediators to change the situation. When Jeff Wall visited this institution two years ago, he vocalized that the way in which a group treats those outside of the group says everything about that group. While people are entitled to have bad days and make mistakes, awareness goes a long way in helping to facilitate harmony. It isn't an ulti- matum, but as a guideline it can work. “My Identity” by Hye-Jin Cho . O D nexibition - “SoRa” by SoRa Chung Korean : “popkorn” by Julie Han Concourse Gallery group show, October 24-31 The word is missing a letter. One wonders if it has been misspelled or if itis a deliberate ploy. ‘Where has it fled to, the ‘h’ of homelands, hearts, and heroes? An Unexibition. It rolls off the tongue and limps ashore, where we find it not so foreign after all. The absent ‘h’ swayed in silence from the very beginning. Will it be missed? Will anyone notice? Prefix ‘un' as in, “this is an exibition but it is not..." The word unravels and folds inside out. What you see is what you don't. Identity. What of it? Locating Identity is a bottomless quest the can stifle even the most blessed of crusaders. The subtitle here foreshadows distance, difficulty, incompletion - an epic saga whose long awaited finale ends deliberately with a to be continued" stapled to the finish. Around and around it goes; where it lives, is yet unknown. The image of identity is as flux as oceans. For some, like Julie Jung-Won Lee, whose sculptural self-portrait inhabits the exhibition foyer, identity is a living, breathing, growing grey space caught between the polarity of black and white worlds. A suggestion that identity can be conflictual is else~ where evident in the confrontational pose of Kwan Yu's self-portrait. Simmering in red, it finds a strate- gic place within the gallery space, leering down from where everybody passing through the gallery is unfree from engagement. It remains to be said, however, that in Unexibition, not all selections deal directly with issues of identity. Most connections are understandably indirect. Engaging identity does not require one to solely do work about it. Immersion into a mélange of artworks that criss-cross various by T] Anzai schools and disciplines can no doubt have a tenden- cy to produce multiple meanings, echoes, and reverberations. The deception of evidence planted is use- less unless it is found. If there is a feeling of incom- pleteness to the package, itis perhaps the result of someone's idea to make it that way. ‘SoRa Chung, who helped organize the exhibit, sought a way to informalize the show as a means to open and bring two parts together. The resulting consensus was that the exhibition didn't want to be an exhibition, hence the prefix and a purposeful misspelling. The end is not the end, and Unexibition is not an exhibition. Not in the usual sense, that is. Consider it a gathering of works, where a commu- nal identity blueprints the skeleton of the show. The body still floats like ether. Remember that the world, too, is incomplete, regardless of charts, maps, and satellites. It must first be taken apart to. be put back together. So then, the rest is up to...whom? Sometimes, those who don't say much usually have the most to say. If for some reason a person, group, entity is left unheard, it falls upon the rest of us to become mediators to change the situation. When Jeff Wall visited this institution two years ago, he vocalized that the way in which a group treats those outside of the group says everything about that group. While people are entitled to have bad days and make mistakes, awareness goes a long way in helping to facilitate harmony. It isn’t an ulti- matum, but as a guideline it can work. Identits