LOS ANGELES — Art wallops us emotionally because it transforms abstract, internal emotion into a real, external thing. Ideas and thoughts become elements we can see, hear, or feel in our hands. It’s exciting when an artistic endeavor takes human interiority more literally — creating works inspired by the musculature of our bodies. In Permeate, Meeson Pae’s first solo show with Anat Egbi gallery, presented as part of the Getty’s art initiative PST: Art & Science Collide, the artist brings viewers inward to examine the alien alchemy of the human body.
In the main room, six paintings surround two multimedia installations — oil on canvas flanking structures of resin, steel, ink, and glass. An adjacent room houses an additional painting and a two-channel video installation projected through thin, laser-cut stainless steel tendrils that hang from the ceiling like decorative, reflective garlands emulating the vascular cartography of the nervous system.
Structures of organ lookalikes come together in Pae’s work to present an almost galactic landscape. Foreign cities of fleshy beige and futuristic chrome manifest across canvas, as sculpture, and in the imagination. It’s as if you are shrunken to a microscopic size and floating through a human bloodstream (RIP the beloved Magic School Bus). Pae achieves this using 3D sculpting software to generate and manipulate videos that emulate our internal systems at work. She’ll isolate an instance in the generated video that renders a sense of tension, growth, or change, and create from that lead. This technique results in scenes that feel ripe with movement — globular, flowing, and secreting willfully.
All three of Pae’s installations in Permeate incorporate polished stainless steel. The pristine metal offers two things: a reminder of the exactitude and intense purpose bestowed upon the soft tissue of our bodies; and a distorted reflection of our own bodies as we view the exhibition. Her use of stainless steel anchors amid abstract flesh forms evokes a reimagined hospital — an operating room without any of the mechanical beeping; prone, dissected bodies without the clinical signs of life.
Pae’s work elicits a perspective fueled by wonderment and biological curiosity. However, I’m aware that her art is influenced by losing her brother to non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in childhood and I, myself, recently lost a family member. So it is through a lens tinged with acute grief that I view Permeate. It is a study in the fascination and betrayal of the human body. How spectacular is it that these metropolises of soft tissue, rigid structures, and electrical tendrils can function so seamlessly together in a dreamscape of biological harmony? How terrible is it that they can rupture or disease and suddenly stop altogether?
It’s peculiar and impressive how Pae reflects the possibilities of our own bodies back to us. Alien and familiar; clinical and abstract. A safe space to contend with the phenomenon of our biological inner-workings and the opulent worlds they create. It beckons you to look past the art, beneath the skin.
Meeson Pae: Permeate continues at Anat Ebgi (6150 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles) through November 2. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
