KIAF Seoul 2023

Featuring Ivana Štulić, Krista Louise Smith, and Kajin Kim

September 6th-10th

Swivel Gallery is pleased to offer a three-person presentation for KIAF Seoul,  featuring paintings by Ivana Štulić, ceramics by Krista Louise Smith, and installations by Kajin Kim. The booth brings together a trio of artists who deal in the aesthetics of evanescence, illuminating the residual imprints, impressions, and vestiges left behind in our proceedings of daily life. Together, they pose the question: how can what is present be animated by what is absent? Through three distinct approaches, each artist draws attention to the caprices of human subjectivity, highlighting how objects and other remnants can retain the sentiment of what is no longer within reach of the naked eye.

Ivana Štulić’s tranquil oil paintings move sequentially throughout the booth, operating within the confines of a single day. Ranging from morning to evening, these frozen moments of time take place in the liminal corners of a domestic space, each capturing a suspended moment between departure or arrival. If not entirely absent, figures are obscured from view, and narrative information lingers only in seemingly-mundane details, like a selection of items left out on a dining table. By shifting perspectives as time proceeds in hazy increments, Štulić creates a sense of indeterminacy for the viewer–making it unclear whether we are inside or outside of the painting, or fully privy to events taking place beyond the canvas.  

Krista Louise Smith's sculptures similarly toy with enigma by evoking otherworldly evidence, presenting bones and skeletal fragments arranged in impossible configurations. Several of these elegant fossil facsimiles, wrapped around stoneware in lifelike ways, reanimate Vanitas motifs–summoning forth the relationship between desire and dread. The highly-polished dark or gold surfaces of the ceramics and their vintage glass counterparts hold mirror reflections of other objects, caught in the slippery and undulating movement of light. In spite of their weight and solidity, Smith’s sculptures carry reminders of transience, hinting at the existence of a spectral in-between realm.

Kajin Kim's translucent silicone constructions utilize light to beckon the viewer's gaze towards something hidden just beneath the surface of the membrane. This invitation to look, to feel, is interrupted by the soft and illuminated surface which acts as a boundary, charging the space between itself and the viewer with uncertainty and longing. Materiality harnesses immaterial sentiments by summoning, yet denying, desire. The likeness of the surface to a screen furthers Kim’s overlap of images, light, and space to create an imaginary coexistence of here and there, of different times that are far apart; connecting each to each other– things which are separate– while also carrying traces of the body in coexistence.

Within this artistic exploration, material objects and the ethereal qualities of light serve as vessels for memory, creating a negative space that evokes imagery and sensations that have slipped into the past. The artists skillfully navigate the boundaries of presence and absence, finding an enduring resonance in the medial dimension. 

Ivana Štulić (b.1991, Croatia) is a New York-based Croatian artist. Štulić received a BA (2017) and MA (2018) from the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb - Croatia and MFA (2020) in painting at the New York Academy of Art. During her studies she was awarded the Kylemore Abbey Global Centre Residency, LCU Fund for Women’s Education Grant Award, New York Academy of Art Academy Scholar Award and Appreciation of the Academic Council from Croatian University. A three-time Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and two-time Frankopan Fond Award recipient, Štulić has participated in group shows in Croatia, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Brazil, UK and New York. Her work has been shown at  Daniel  Raphael (London), Swivel Gallery (Brooklyn), de boer (Los Angeles, and resides in private collections in the USA and Europe.

Krista-Louise Smith (b. 1986, Canada) is living and working in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from OCAD University (formerly the Ontario College of Art and Design) in Toronto in 2010, and in 2014 an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art, where she was a NYAA Merit Scholarship recipient. Smith has conducted residencies at the Leipzig International Artist in Residence in Leipzig, Germany, at Byrdcliffe Artist Colony in Woodstock, New York, and at the Art Students League Residency at VYT, Sparkhill, New York. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for the Arts Grant and has also been awarded the Ruth Katzman Prize and a New York Foundation for the Arts Covid Relief Grant. She currently works as an adjunct professor of studio arts at F.I.T. and Queens College. Recent exhibitions include Carvalho Park (Brooklyn), NICODIM (New York), Half Gallery (New York), and Deanna Evans Projects (New York). 

Kajin Kim (b. 1993, South Korea) is living and working in Seoul, South Korea. She is a recent Fulbright Graduate of Hunter College MFA. Kim utilizes moving images, printed matter, and installation to explore the complexities of mediation in the contemporary experience of physical disembodiment. Disparate projections, transparent prints, iridescent surfaces and screens resonate with each other in her installations, creating an environment where images are touched, reflected, and looked through. Kim made the Dean’s List at the Paris College of Art in 2015 while on an Outbound Exchange from Hongik University. Her work has been shown at CICA Museum (Gimpo, Korea),  Swivel Gallery (Brooklyn),   Hauser & Wirth Hunter College 2021 MFA Thesis Spotlight (Online) and Everyday Mooonday Gallery (Seoul).