SPORTSWOMAN
Until January 17th, 2016
@JAUS

From a European point of view, Kim Ye would be the West coast/more subversive equivalent of French Artist, Annette Messager. Excellent debuts for this young emerging artist from LA.

 

SPORTSWOMAN represents not only Kim Ye’s first time showing with JAUS, but will also be the first individual exhibition at JAUS in nearly 5 years, and only the second since the gallery’s inception. Ye will be exhibiting all new works in sculpture, painting, installation, performance, and video.

Ye’s oeuvre can be seen as reflections and manifestations of how the mind and, integral to this, the body responds to preordained constructs such as behavioral norms, human-made environments, and collective rituals. Acting within and pressing against the pressure towards orthodoxy, Ye’s work describes the latent psychic forces that provoke an individual’s desires to experience the strange, the new, and the unexplored.

For the current project, Ye directs her attention to ideas and objects specifically related to sports and athletic training–locating their analogs in artistic practice and BDSM culture. All rule-based disciplines, they constitute a significant role in the artist’s personal history as competitive athlete, visual artist, and professional dominatrix. In each of these fields, there is the expectation that participants acknowledge and operate by an agreed-upon code, though it is often in transcending or bending this very code that one emerges victorious.

Themes of discipline, mastery, endurance, and power exchange run through the show. Taking into account the gendered experience of the athlete/artist/dominatrix, Ye examines how these delineations within the quest for personal glory informs one’s concept of self and reverberates through interpersonal dynamics. The work questions whether this ritualistic practice/training is in preparation for competition, or if the very notion of competition itself is a collective fiction that facilitates practice.

About the Artist

Kim Ye (1984, Beijing, China) is a Los Angeles-based, multidisciplinary artist whose work incorporates installation, video, sculpture, painting, and performance. She received her MFA from the UCLA (2012) and a Teaching Artist Fellowship from the Armory (2014). Inspired by everyday events, her work explores concepts of sexuality, intimacy, and the exchange between an artist and their audience. She has exhibited at The Getty Center, OHWOW, The Underground Museum, California Institute of the Arts, Pomona College Museum of Art, Alter Space, and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, among others