Destinations/Departures
When: Thu., Apr. 28, 2022 - Sat., Jun. 11, 2022 at 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Destinations/Departures: Nick Farhi, Sophie Kovel, Hyoju Cheon
Curated by Victoria Horrocks, Ho Won Kim and Carlota Ortiz Monasterio
April 28 – June 11, 2022
Nick Farhi April 28 to May 12
Sophie Kovel May 13 to May 26
Hyoju Cheon May 28 to June 11
New York, NY- Iron Velvet is proud to present Destinations/Departures, a six-week rotating exhibition exploring the home as a dynamic space of movement, where the limits between the private and the public, the local and the global, the personal and the political, are constantly being negotiated. Through three two-week solo shows of artists Nick Farhi, Sophie Kovel, and Hyoju Cheon, Destinations/Departures probes the diverse ways in which the domestic interweaves the individual, the collective, the political, and the cultural. It will be on view from April 28th through June 11th, 2022.
In Destinations/Departures, each artist establishes an intimate dialogue with the domestic space of the gallery. Conceiving home not merely as a place of dwelling, but as one of mobility—of destination, transit, and departure—the three presentations suggest diverse modes of inhabiting the world. Through an innovative use of oil and pastel on aluminum, Nick Farhi renders seemingly commonplace domestic objects as extraordinary presences: portals mediating between the personal and the social. Sophie Kovel’s bold doormat series charges the ubiquitous, quotidian object with cultural iconography and political phrases to comment on the leakage of mass media culture into the private sphere. Lastly, through a site-specific installation, Hyoju Cheon sheds light on overlooked domestic spaces—corners, steps, window frames—and activates our often unnoticed relationship with the architecture of home.
Through their distinct projects, each artist conveys an experience of being at home that is marked by multiplicity, movement, and interconnection. In blurring the public and the private, Destinations/Departures hopes to be its own journey to reconceptualize one’s sense of “home” in the world.
About Nick Farhi
Nick Farhi (b. 1987, New York) utilizes installation and still life painting to connect people, places, and things. Through research, histories and relationships to one another are addressed and given a meeting place. Desperate, lush, and seismic shapes are made from confabulated memory and happenstance in the artist’s practice, arriving to a number of cross-figural dialogues and polemics reflecting current events. Farhi has exhibited his work both domestically and internationally, at outposts such as the Kirkland Gallery of the Harvard GSD, the Mana Museum of Contemporary Art, Bill Brady Gallery, Galleri Golsa, Karma International, and A Gathering of the Tribes, among others.
About Sophie Kovel
Sophie Kovel (b. 1996, Los Angeles) is an artist, writer, and translator. Gleaning and undermining iconographies of power, fascism, and white supremacy that can take banal and overlooked forms—on flagpoles, doormats, postcards, wrapping paper, and real estate holdings—Kovel reckons with the surfaces and structures that hold up American ideology. Recent exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Demark; VERY Project Space, Berlin; and the Jewish Museum, New York. Kovel has spoken on panels and symposiums at universities and institutions including Columbia University and the Brooklyn Public Library. Her interviews and criticism have been published in Artforum, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Spike, and elsewhere.
About Hyoju Cheon
Hyoju Cheon (b. 1994, Seoul) is an explorer and researcher who collects movements. Her multimedia practice–often casting a space, an object, or a body in motion–responds to the conditions of a site. Her work documents bodies as they move through space, draws their trajectories, and archives the material traces they leave behind. Hyoju has exhibited her works in Seoul at Project Broom, Dongsomun, Meindo, Gallery Imazoo, and Gaon Gallery; and in New York at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the Abrons Arts Center, among others.
About the Curators
Destinations/Departures is a collaboration between New York based curators Victoria Horrocks, Ho Won Kim, and Carlota Ortiz Monasterio, who are currently pursuing a critical and curatorial studies program at Columbia University.
About Iron Velvet
Iron Velvet is a project gallery space led by Young Jeon. The gallery takes its name from the phrase Iron hand in a velvet glove. Located in an apartment on the UES, Iron Velvet invites artists to create a site-specific installation responding to the residential space. Additional programming will be made available, such as artist-led workshops and an accompanying parallel online exhibition highlighting research on the exhibiting artists in the metaverse space.
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