Eva Koťátková: Out of Sight
Anicka Yi: 6,070,430K of Digital Spit
May 22–July 26, 2015
Opening: May 21, 5:30–8pm
Conversation between artists Eva Koťátková and Anicka Yi,
and curators Henriette Huldisch and Alise Upitis, 5:30pm
MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, MA
Eva Koťátková: Out of Sight
Hayden Gallery
Eva Koťátková(b. 1982, Prague) takes as her central theme the individual’s relationship to normative social structures and institutions, such as the government, school, the family, and the hospital. An obsessive collector of historical books on psychology, medicine, and social science, the artist culls images from these sources time and again for her installations, collages, and drawings. Counting Czech Surrealism and Absurdist fiction among her sources of inspiration, throughout her work she gives form to the invisible, disciplining force exerted by rules, conventions, and rituals.
For her exhibition at the List, Koťátková is creating several new groups of works that build upon her signature visual vocabulary. A group of new sculptures was modeled on illustrations of old animal traps. Many of Koťátková’s earlier welded works are also structures of entrapment, harking back to antiquated orthopedic appliances, outmoded restraints for mental patients, or medieval torture devices. And yet, “I am not pointing…to some drastic imprisonment or actual physical violence,” she has said, “but rather to the invisible, mental cages that we carry in ourselves supported by inner fears, anxieties, or those that others build around us because we do not fulfill society’s expectations.”
Eva Koťátková: Out of Sight is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Anicka Yi: 6,070,430K of Digital Spit
Reference Gallery
Anicka Yi (b. 1971, Seoul) has encased tempura-fried flowers and chrome-plated dumbbells in Plexiglas; frozen a lamb’s heart inside a block of ice carved in the shape of a man’s head; and installed a pair of working stainless steel dryer doors that, when opened, smelled like bullfrogs and the sweepings from her studio floor. Through combinations of seemingly permanent and perishable materials, Yi’s sculptural works reorder the cultural forces that privilege clarity over ambiguity, containment over leakage, and vision above all other senses.
6,070,430K of Digital Spit plays with the ambiguous meaning of taste as both bodily sense and aesthetic discernment. Foregrounding the artist’s ongoing project The Flavor Genome, she examines how “flavors”—visual, olfactory, gustatory, auditory—can form sense memories and spur longing, although their cultural and economic value is subject to global consumerism and a hierarchy of aesthetics.
Catalog
Yi’s first catalog, 6,070,430K of Digital Spit, has been produced by the List Center in conjunction with her exhibition. The book includes an exchange between Caroline A. Jones and Yi on scent, ethnicity, and symbiotic microorganisms; an essay on networks and extravisual means by Johanna Burton; and an essay by Alise Upitis on the irreducible ambiguity of Yi’s work. 6,070,430K of Digital Spit is published by the List Center and Mousse Publishing.
Anicka Yi: 6,070,430K of Digital Spit is curated by Alise Upitis, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Support for these exhibitions has been generously provided by the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and the Friends of the List. Special thanks to Meyer Riegger, Berlin and Karlsruhe, and 47 Canal, New York.
Anicka Yi is a 2014–15 Visiting Artist at MIT, presented by the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
