Je-an Cedric Cruz | Contributor
Featured Image: The fabric in the photo occupies the positive space while the background itself is the negative space. | Courtesy of Je-an Cedric Cruz
The Gales Gallery has recently opened another exhibition for Fall 2019 featuring The Absence of, which is an exhibition created by visual arts studio students Esther Kim and Alaa Asim.
Mixed media and pyrography are the features of their artwork. Nevertheless, it is wandering in the realms of life and death through time concepts and qualities of regeneration. It will showcase fragmented and vague bodies of work that aim to ask questions and draw connections by virtue of subjectivity and objectivity of the body and spirit. Moreover, the absent body becomes hardened because of the partition of history, knowledge and memories.
The fabric in the photo occupies the positive space while the background itself is the negative space. Given the light that accompanies the image, it produces a value of light colours. Hence, the visual colour portrayed is a bit yellow, which means it is a warm colour. The shape of the artwork is indefinite, but it somehow resembles a ghost and a woman who is clothed with varying lengths of fabric. Rectangular lines are also indefinite: some are wavy and some are cut short.
Overall, the artwork seems to portray what happens after death; someone will appear in spirit form telling you to go to either heaven or purgatory: a belief that is still practiced in Asia and other countries with Roman Catholic belief.
Esther Kim is a Canadian-Korean artist. She is in her fifth year at York and specializes in visual arts (studio). She explores the concepts of the body and uses certain practices, medium, and scale to induce vagueness in tangible format.
Alaa Asim is a Canadian artist in her last year of the honours program in visual art and art history. She uses mixed mediums to create artwork in the realms of sculpture and abstract painting. She believes in the importance of the spaces we interact with, which are as important as the works of art she creates.
Today, October 10, is the final day to enjoy the exhibit.
