MINOUK LIM: MEMENTO MOIRÉ

Lim’s exploration of her themes takes an expansive turn in the present exhibition, opening out beyond the parameters of specific locale and time onto more abstract, symbolic dimensions of myths, rituals, and totems both timeless and contemporary. The works in Memento Moiré synthesize an array of ideas and visual elements that have long permeated her oeuvre: cosmology, mystical and spiritual iconography, vestiges of nature and the detritus of civilization. Deploying diverse materials, including paint, urethane, and fabric, as well as terra cotta powder, cuttlefish bones, and castoff objects of modern life, she has created several new series of wall-based works that alternate between abstraction, allegory, and unmediated representation of material reality.

Take, for instance, the swirling abstraction of Le Revenant, composed of poured urethane and acrylic paint onto a ground of terra cotta powder. It seems to proffer a view of a mystical portal or a stylized schema of the universe—“an amorphous mandala,” as the artist calls it. It also echoes the visual language and ritualistic connotations of Native American sand painting and its modern inheritors (desert mystics like Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Pelton among them). But the artist has also embedded, around the periphery of the central image, fragments of cuttlefish bones, an object that recurs in many of her works as an abiding relic of primordial life, a reminder of a world without humanity and of the vast, almost geologic, passage of time. Resonant with the concept of memento mori, though in the context of a contemporary world confronting impending environmental and climatic disasters, other works such as the Almost Too Calm series presents tidy boxes of cuttlefish bones, barnacle shells, and dried seaweed embedded in strata of glacial urethane along with mundane artifacts of human life—a camera strap, a roller shade pulley, and other loose parts of useless objects—preserved as though for some future museum display of an extinct civilization. Taken together, the works in Memento Moiré constitute what the artist has termed “an archeology of the future,” delineating the inflection points in the descending arc of the Anthropocene.