By Abigail Holliday
Staff Writer
Walking into the College’s Art Gallery, you will find the mesmerizing sculptures and canvases by artists Simona Prives and Juyon Lee.
Open until Dec. 6, the “Something between air and light” exhibit features prints and sculptures made from glass, resin, lights and images, all brought together to illustrate a sense of time and space.
The gallery is transformed to house the canvases and sculptures designed by Prives and Lee. Dark colors swirled on canvases paired with suspended sculptures illuminated with LEDs bring to life a sense of the extraterrestrial and a mature atmosphere.
Prives is a visual artist who uses paints, sketches, and multiple textures and shapes on canvases to illustrate the growth and decay within man’s relationship to organic matter, according to her Instagram.
The Brooklyn-based artist received her master’s degree in fine arts from Pratt Institute and has gone on to receive many important fellowships, such as Santa Fe Art Institute Thematic Residency, 4Heads on Governors Island and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia.
When Prives isn’t working on her own projects, she is teaching art and design at the Parsons School of Design, New York University and Hostos Community College in the Bronx.
Lee is a South Korean artist who split her childhood moving between the east coast and Seoul, South Korea.
“Being in between multiple places has allowed me to reflect on many things I had taken for granted,” Lee said in an interview with The Signal. “In a way, it gives time to distance myself from the familiar and to rethink about them in different points of life.”
Lee expressed her interest in time, space and interconnectivity through her work by using lights, colors and imaging to imitate ethereal structures such as air and light.
“I began working with resin and glass because of their transparency and duality in permanence and impermanence. As I experimented more and more with resin, I noticed that it has its own pace of movement, especially with variations in temperature,” Lee said. “Even when I work with materials that seem very concrete and permanent, I tend to use them in ways that make them seem fleeting and not easy to grasp. It reflects my interest in change and perception and passage of time.”
Lee received her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College and her master’s from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her exhibits have been featured in many renowned locations, such as Tufts University Art Galleries and the NARS Foundation Main Gallery.
“The series of exhibited works in TCNJ reflect on connection and disconnection experienced through communications-based digital technology. The woven images are from text messages I exchanged with my family during my grandfather’s funeral,” Lee said. “Interconnection is a condition that any being is born into. I think it is more the matter of in what moments one becomes more aware of how all things are related to one another.”
The exhibit will remain open until Dec. 1 in the Art Gallery, located in the Art and Interactive Multimedia Building, from 12pm to 7pm on Tuesdays through Thursdays and 1pm to 3pm on Sundays.
