Paige Jiyoung Moon’s Days of Our Lives
at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell
Paige Jiyoung Moon’s solo exhibit, Days of Our Lives, at Steve Turner, Los Angeles, is utterly immersive and compelling. Through minute details both in size (with most paintings averaging just 12 inches in size) and in presenting the everyday, Moon highlights the mundane aspects of life, elevating the ephemeral and making the fleeting more permanent and profound.
In Ko’s Old Apartment, Moon portrays intricate details to offer a glimpse into a friend’s hangout and an artist’s life. We see two young women lounging with face masks on, atop one twin bed and one makeshift bed on the floor, as if mid-sleepover. And we also see clues into an artist’s life, as Ko’s tools are embedded around the room — a set of colored pencils on the desk along with a glass of paintbrushes in the foreground and a shelf with paints in the background. Small details like a couple small bags of trash on the floor also offer the viewer insight into the ephemeral nature of these paintings. Moon captures the ultimate lived and imperfect realities of life rather than an imagined, perfected, and unrealistic version.
As Moon described to a 2014 interview, she has a specific process for recording such memories and times with friends. Moon noted that, “When I hang out with my friends, I look around the environment where I am and imagine it as a painting. There are certain times that make me feel like I want to remember everything around me like colors, furniture, and people in the environment. I think of those days and some funny happenings that make me laugh. Later, I start sketching on papers to see compositions and details. I try to convey a moment to a similar visual image, but I change if I want to.” This idea of depicting the mundane is key to all of Moon’s works, though the exhibit Days of Our Lives does seem to highlight two distinct subjects — those of the outdoor, nature-inspired trips like Mirror House, Baldy Road, A Hiker, and Undisturbed Nature and those of the interior and more people-oriented spaces such as Warm House, Ko’s Old Apartment, Uninvited Guest, and Sol.
In Warm House, for instance, Moon depicts the details of an intimately packed restaurant. It is at once familiar and cozy. She paints small details like how some people sit together in restaurant spaces chatting while others do so on their phones. Throughout her interior works, the inextricable ties of phones to our everyday life is abundantly clear, but not in a pessimistic or demonstrative way. It is simply another reality Moon observes and paints.
As Leah Ollman observed in her review for the Los Angeles Times, “Moon’s depiction of herself and her peers so consistently engaged with their phones — whether on a social night out or a private night in — adds to the naturalism of the pictures. They are true not just to the material texture of the everyday but also to its cultural texture.” In Undisturbed Nature, Moon again depicts this “cultural texture” as a pair of people take photos of one another taking photos on their phones. The details Moon references, like the snow sticking to their shoes and the playfulness of the moment, are just another aspect that make her paintings inviting, memorable, and relatable. . .
To read the rest of Caldwell’s review, go to Riot Material Magazine: https://www.riotmaterial.com/paige-jiyoung-moons-days-of-our-lives/
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