American Ghosts

New York, NY On Friday, April 7, 2023, 5-7 PM visual artists Yeon Ji Yoo and Rachel Sydlowski will present two new installations exploring the American landscape and its myths in the exhibition American Ghosts.

As a latchkey youth of the 80’s, Yeon Ji Yoo learned a version of America on television as a technicolor landscape of cerulean skies and generalized shapes overlapped to become a stand in for Yellowstone. In growing up, Yoo has learned that technicolor is not the name of a place, but a process of making fiction. In Chasing Crows, Yoo reconnects to a childhood landscape of navigating a cornfield plagued by phantom voyeur crows and inundated in color. She aims to connect the start of her American dream journey to its elusive destination of a cartoon land.

The vacationland of the Northeast serves as a locus of investigation for Rachel Sydlowski. The promise of the road, access to leisure time, the physical and mental restorative qualities of “North” play an integral role in her sculpture-based installation Summerland/Sunderland. The original Slumberland was a restaurant/motor lodge built and managed by Sydlowski’s great-uncle on the coast of Maine in the 1940s. The title is both a play on the original motor lodge’s name, “Slumberland” and “Summerland” a liminal space between the physical and astral plane, an idyllic resting place between reincarnations. The motorlogde’s lost history allows for a fabulists interpretation through the use of wood, ceramics,  modular serigraphs and found objects.

Gallery open Friday and Saturday 5-7pm.