YELLOWSTONER
A new video and works on paper by Pearl C. Hsiung
1 March - 15 March 2014
Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Opening Saturday, 1 March 2014, 7 - 9 pm
Closing and performance event Saturday 15 March 2014, doors 8 pm, performance 9 pm
Organized by Anna Sew Hoy
Yellowstoner is both the title for Pearl C. Hsiung's solo exhibition and for the video work that will be premiered at Human Resources. In the fall of 2010, with the help of a USA Projects grant, Hsiung traveled to Yellowstone National Park. The resulting video follows the journey of a lone character moving through the geothermal features, waterfalls, and vast landscapes of the park. Hsiung composed a free-form musical score in collaboration with musicians Kelly Coats, Kathleen Kim, Scott Martin, and Coady Willis.
The upstairs gallery features a suite of works on paper painting esoteric words generated from Hsiung's iconography and mythopoeia. Words and phrases such as ABAATANAABA and HISSING CORALS appear and dissolve into the ink-and-enamel soaked paper.
While Hsiung is known for her large-scale canvases depicting colorful landscapes that verge on the anthropomorphic and psychedelic, here in the video Yellowstoner, a real landscape becomes the expressions of the lone figure whose face we never see. The new word paintings conjure these mystic landscapes and further suggest the merging of subject and object, figure and ground, the idea of self and non-dualism.
The exhibition will close with GEYZERZ, a performance event that centers around footage of Yellowstone's most well-known and reliable geyser captured on September 2, 2010 at 6:51 p.m. In this 29-minute video, Old Faithful spurts minor puffs of steam and water as the setting sun tints the sky from light blue to mauve to violet. Finally, Old Faithful launches into a powerful eruption 7 minutes long. Musicians will perform a live soundtrack while vocalists standing in the audience will 'sing' at the peak of the eruption. If at this point, the audience is seduced into joining the sonic outbreak , the room could become a kinetic eruption of its own. All are welcome to let off some steam in the dance party to follow.