Flyer Blues
On View thru June 6
A disposable printed surface becomes a site of drawing, translation, survival, and belonging.
Opening Reception
May 9
5–8 PM
On View
Thru
June 6
In Flyer Blues, Sojung Kwon turns to the weekly supermarket flyer, a disposable printed form built from short-lived information such as sale prices, food items, and coupons.
During her early years as an immigrant in the United States, these materials accumulated daily in her mailbox, their dense layouts of images, product names, prices ending in .99, and references to different cultural communities forming a visual field that was at once unfamiliar and compelling.
Working across drawing, photography, and video, Kwon searches for signification in these ordinary printed surfaces.
Through careful hand rendering and phonetic transcription, she reworks what is quickly produced and easily discarded into something slower and more deliberate, while also shifting the flyers from functional information into objects to be looked at, carrying associations of consumption, survival, and cultural identity.
The hand slows the flyer down.
What was made to be scanned quickly is redrawn, sounded out, and held in attention.
The Way It Sounds
This inquiry is also present in The Way It Sounds (2021), in which Kwon transcribes the U.S. Oath of Citizenship according to how it sounds in her mother tongue and reads it aloud, drawing on a method used by non-fluent speakers while also exposing the gap between sound and meaning.
Produced between February 2020 and May 2021, the work reflects a period shaped by the pandemic and rising xenophobia, situating questions of language, translation, and belonging within a legal structure that is performed through speech.
Sojung Kwon
Sojung Kwon received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Her work has been presented at Insa Art Space, Seoul; Kunstvlaai Exhibition, Amsterdam; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; S1F Gallery, Los Angeles; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles; Machine Project, Los Angeles; Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro; Gallery Dam, Seoul; and the Tahoe Gallery at Sierra Nevada College, NV. She lives and works in Los Angeles.