Jason River

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Gallery d’Arte, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 518 New York City is proud to present Jaiseok Kang a.k.a Jason River: JASON RIVER, NY, 2016. Curated by Suechung Koh. The Solo Exhibition will run from March 17- 31, 2016 with Opening Reception on Thursday, March 17th, from 6-8PM.

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With models posing in the nude, sometimes in classic poses associated with statuary, there's a freedom for viewers to create their own ideas about what they're seeing, their relationship to the images and who these figures are. Yet the addition of wrapping, tape and labels indicating the models' origins creates a different dynamic.

 

What happens to a viewer's identification with a model? Is the photographed figure still seen as beautiful or something foreign, unknown? Is the figure deadened when constricted and covered up? The use of physical labeling/packaging that obscures a figure's body and severely limits movement can serve as a metaphor for how social labeling/packaging in our contemporary world can obscure who we are and dictate our possibilities.

Packaging/labeling can bind us in ways that limit a broader, more imaginative understanding of our humanity. 

 

Jaiseok Kang (a.k.a Jason River) was born in Seoul, Korea.

After graduate college, he pursued his career as a commercial photographer for two years while attending a graduate program at Hongik University majoring in Fine Art Photography. After holding several group exhibitions in Seoul, in 2005, he came to New York City and had his first solo show at Contemporary Gallery. He studied Fine Art at Brooklyn College until 2009, and has been shown both his photographs and printmaking extensively in galleries and a museum throughout the United States.

Now he lives in Brooklyn and continues his work in Long Island City, New York.