My paintings implement pictorial novels that dominate the broad surface allowing the viewers to read a personally created myth. The fictional scene conveys a psychic self-identity. It records private journeys to find self-destinations in my spirituality, asking the viewers the same questions about their own interpretation of their life. Showing a scene of a human surrounded by flowers or her own satisfactory loneliness on bedtime, this spiritual story also includes old mythology-like figures, featuring nudity, a floating personalized God looking at the earth in the sky, or metamorphosis caterpillars. As a form, rather than making whole screens full of strokes, the characteristics of my painting can be discovered on a white background. Neither do I consciously intend to empty it, nor try to consciously fill it. The white spaces are the margins filtered and filtered within my own logic, or the natural remnants that are unnecessary to represent. But the white part reveals the whole thing. The structures left by brushes and other traces create the formative logic of the painting, and it becomes my painting language. The structure that transforms the white background into space is similar to the principle of Chinese painting, but I create a more physical three-dimensional space than poetic.
About the Artist
Ara Ko (b. 1988, Hongseong, Korea) received a BFA from Ewha Womans University (Seoul, Korea) and is a current MFA candidate in MICA’s Hoffberger School of Painting (Baltimore, MD). She has exhibited at the CICA Museum (Seoul, Korea), Gallery We (Seoul, Korea), Washington Square Park (New York, NY), Miboo Art Center (Busan, Korea), and Sung Nam Art Center (Seongnam-si, Korea). Ko has received numerous awards during her graduate studies including the Leslie King Hammond Graduate Fellowship (MICA) and a CCC Community Art Grant (MICA).Artist's Statement
My works represent my psychic space on 4-meter-long projector screen.Featured Work
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