Above: Teatime, 2011, mixed media, 5" x 5"
It's interesting to consider how industrial processes have affected graphic art and how many of the techniques used (with their attendant aesthetics) have disappeared over the years. There's the obsolete printing methods: movable type printing presses, photo engraving, PMT's, blueprints, diazos, faxes, photocopies, dittos, mimeographs, carbon paper, etcetera. Then there's the detritus of computer pre-history: perforated daisy-wheel printer paper, Scantron exam sheets, punch cards, etcetera, carrying nostalgic affect for those of us to whom these things used to be so common. A lot of these techniques, when used in art, accordingly seem dated to our contemporary eye. In the case of artist Yoonhee Choi, she has gone back to use another one of these forgotten systems originally marketed to illustrators to forge completely new work without the noxious whiff of the old. It's because she's taken the material and subverted its use to the extent that it sings anew.
With titles such as "Bramble," "Dawdle," "Grumble," "Even," "Cicle," and "Jaboo," the works shown in Choi's most recent exhibition bespeak a certain innocence, akin to tales from illustrated children's books that have been both pixilated and purified down to a symbology straight out of Flatland. Entitled "Madcap Graphs," the show, encompassing 20 recent works by the artist displays a casual, consensual relationship with hard-edged, gridded, monumental abstraction from a century ago of the De Stijl and Suprematist variety, presented as tiny whimsical 'cartoons' often just one inch square. Encased in a hand-drawn light graphite matrix that is not ruled with a straightedge (what the artist calls an "unpredictable armature"), the work is composed from small pieces of illustrators' and graphic artists' adhesive films and tapes (formerly known by the brand names Zip-a-tone, Chartpak, and Letratone) which have been made obsolete over the past twenty years with the introduction of the computer to illustration and graphic design. Half-circles, dots, dashes, tonal fields, solid color, dashed lines: a personal lexicon unique to each work of tiny deliberate shapes has been manufactured and deployed in these compositions. The machine-made films, which themselves lend a certain technical rigor to the work, also manage to convey a childlike, innocent sensibility in their "sticker"-like quality (often with primary colors), excised with an X-Acto blade from the original sheet of film and stuck in place in a composed array over the light grid. Don't take the remarks on childhood here to mean that the work is light or easily digestible. This is the mature work of an artist who chooses to work on a canvas that is portable and hand-held.
Occasionally, Choi's mysterious semaphore language of dots and lines seems imbued with narrative content, which may be partially due to the way the work is constructed. A leads to B (with a dotted line, often) which leads to C, and in certain cases, these relationships begin to resemble molecular chemical diagrams in their geometry. Compositions often use the resonance of similar elements to produce sensation. Mathematical-like symbols show equivalence, addition, subtraction of elements in the pieces. In other cases, a dense, treelike armature teased out of Sumi ink in lieu of the graphite grid is used to create compositions that start to resemble a trunk road with many branches, some with cul-de-sacs and interesting symbologic "dead ends." The Chartpak bits in these instances are brought to new prominence in spite of their lack of profusion because of their contract with and adjacency to the liquid medium of the ink, producing frissons from the disjunction. The artist's architectural training, while being perhaps facile reference here, bespeaks an organized mind and one trained at different scales of organization, be they buildings, towns, or almost microscopic fields of textured handmade paper.
In summation, the work does a tremendous amount with the most modest of materials, bringing you into their effervescent often light-hearted world, a new visual language built out of discarded scraps from our pre-computer heritage.
Yoonhee Choi, Blackfish Gallery
