GaHee Park
Kissing in the Tree
November 4 - January 14, 2018

Opening reception:
Saturday, November 4
7-10pm

For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private... for they are inseparably connected. -Virginia Woolf, "Three Guineas"

In her first exhibition with the gallery, Gahee Park presents a series of paintings that concern themselves with the private sphere, with the need for people to hide parts of their lives from public display and consumption in order to feel fully human. However, if the private sphere has this quasi-utopian element, it is also fragile and combustible because it is always embedded in the structure of the dominant culture, and it replicates the hierarchies and power dynamics of the public realm. It is a site where repression is released and thus nakedly revealed, a subjective space that it can seem hallucinatory and grotesquely comical even as it feels liberating and essential. The public sphere bleeds into the private, infects it, and the life-sustaining private rituals that take place there can take on a performative aspect that seems contradictory. For whom (or against whom) are we staging these rituals? Ourselves? Each other? The neighbors? The cat? Park's work combines a satirical perspective with a sympathetic investment in the scenes and narratives she depicts, taking a bemused ironic view of these questions.

GaHee Park received her MFA from Hunter College. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Intimisms, James Cohen, New York; Butt on Face, Pioneer Works, New York; No No Means Yes Yes, Marginal Utility Gallery, Philadelphia and Sexuality at NAM Project, Milan. She lives and works in New York.