New video installations and photographic works by Vancouver-based multimedia artist Jin-me Yoon are presented in Unbidden, an exhibition organized by Kamloops Art Gallery with guest curator Susan Edelstein.
We have all accumulated a vast and fragmented bank of images through exposure to the media, the Internet, archival documents and Hollywood films such as Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. The artist stages performances that are metaphors for the effects of war and violence that linger and haunt us. In her essay written for the Unbidden exhibition catalogue, Suzette Min says, “…Yoon attempts in Unbidden to summon a politics of empathy and community, a mutual accommodation of difference, of caring about the other and the self that cuts through the indifference and ignorance, especially in this age of global conflict."
While this notable departure in Yoon's production explores new areas of shared experience, the continued use of her body links previous works with the new, allowing the body to still function as an historical cipher, haunting the present with the past. Yoon's work offers the possibility for an empathetic response, potentially evoking a shared state of psychic anxiety, fear and embodied vulnerability.
The works in Unbidden were filmed in intentionally ambiguous surroundings. In the exhibition catalogue, guest curator Susan Edelstein writes, “Viewers can travel to the sites of their own memories, reinforcing the idea that Unbidden could have been staged in the deserts of Arizona, on a lake in Korea, or near the outskirts of Kamloops, British Columbia. The fact is, it doesn't really matter where the scene takes place, it's the content of the image that provokes the viewer's memory."
