Modern Societies I
ESTHER CHOI
JANUARY 19 – April 11, 2021
Esther Choi, Modern Societies I, 2021, Single-channel video projection, HD, color with sound, 6:02 minutes.
Exploring what photography historian George Baker has referred to as “photography’s expanded field,” Modern Societies I operates in the liminal format of a moving still image—a play on the genre of still life or nature morte. The video work marks a departure from a technique that Esther Choi began exploring nearly fifteen years ago, wherein the artist photographed “post-natural materials” using medium and large format cameras, and then pieced the photographs together by digitally weaving them to create a pictorial surface of continuous landscapes.
Choi’s conceptual and technical considerations for this new project are informed by her interest in bodegón, a kind of 17th-century Spanish genre painting, wherein everyday objects, often pantry items, were combined in dramatically lit tableaus with elements of nature, such as flowers or fruit, uncooked vegetables, and dead animals. Modern Societies I features sculptural materials derived from enriched wheat, water and salt, performing symbolically as the earliest materials used for modeling as well as the elements constitutive of the staff of life. Arranged in forms that elicit multiple associations to the geological, animal and the botanical, the sculptures operate in a state of representational ambiguity, offering up a commentary on the synthetic and ontologically entangled conditions of nature and culture today. Their performance in the film speaks to the status of what it means to create a photograph as a form: the disciplining of liquid, light, paper, plastic and time, operating in elastic tension between animation and stasis.
Choi’s Modern Societies I is an allegory of a moment: created out of a sense of limbo during the pandemic, the piece incorporates sculpture and photography as methods of description intended to mirror the indeterminacy of a contemporary state of being, between entropy, ruin, fecundity and new life.
LECTURE
ESTHER CHOI
April 7
2 PM
Join us via Zoom on April 7 at 2 PM CDT for a lecture by Esther Choi. Use this link to register.
Esther Choi is a Canadian artist and architectural historian based in New York. Her interest in theories of space and human perception, which developed while pursuing her MFA at Concordia University, led her to study architectural history at Harvard University and, later, her Ph.D. at Princeton University. Her artistic work primarily examines how concepts of nature—and, by extension, beliefs about what is natural—are shaped by processes of modernization. Informed by her historical research, her practice typically involves the creation of sculptures and models used in photographic tableaux and moving image installations. She is also interested in experimental forms of institutional and cultural critique. Choi's work has been exhibited internationally and featured in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, 032C, and more. She is the author of the artist’s book Le Corbuffet (Prestel, 2019) and co-editor of Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press, 2010) and Architecture Is All Over (Columbia U Press, 2017).
This event is made possible with support from the Art and Design Lecture Series in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University.