body keeps the score

2019

mana contemporary chicago

Joo Young Lee: Body Keeps the Score
June 22 – July 7, 2019

Opening reception: Saturday, June 22, 2 – 5 p.m.
Performative reading with Caroline Joy Dahlberg: July 6, 6 p.m.
Mana Contemporary Chicago

Mana Contemporary Chicago is pleased to announce Body Keeps the Score, a solo exhibition by Korean artist and New Media Resident Joo Young Lee. Following Cit-e-scape (2017) and Trembling Hill (2018), the new computer-generated animation premiered in this exhibition is the third and final episode of Lee’s trilogy that reflects the themes of memory, violence, and recovery, and will be shown besides 3D-printed sculptures and digital prints.

Alluding to the City of Leonia in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as well as Francisco Goya’s print series, Disasters of War, the animation starts with a landscape filled with fragmented dead pigeons and transitions into a land where vegetations grow by fertilizing on those body parts. Using the role of street pigeons in the Anthropocentric society as a metonym for subjects who are victims of violence, the artist invites the viewer to ponder on the possibility of working through trauma by rewriting its score. Body Keeps the Score is curated by Nicky Ni.

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Joo Young Lee is a new media artist based in Seoul and Chicago. She holds an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute, New York. Using 3D animation, sculpture, and multichannel video installation, Lee investigates the dynamics of safety and fear, simulation and survival, fiction and documentary. Her focus is on contemporary urban environments, which she observes through the lenses of visual research, feminist theory, and media technology. Lee has exhibited at art spaces including Steuben Gallery and Galapagos Art Space, New York; EXPO CHICAGO, Chicago; and Art Space Seogyo, Seoul. She has also participated in screenings at Daedalus Multimedia Art Festival, Mykonos; and the Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul. Lee is the 2018 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, and the recipient of the 2017–18 Arts, Science + Culture Initiative Collaboration Grant from the University of Chicago. She is a 2018–19 Artist-in-Residence at Mana New Media Program Residency.

Nicky Ni is a curator and researcher in time-based art.

Body Keeps the Score: A Reading Night
with Caroline Joy Dahlberg and Joo Young Lee, followed by a conversation moderated by Nicky Ni
July 6,2019, 6-8 PM

Reading night was a part of the programming for Joo Young Lee’s solo exhibition, Body Keeps the Score, at Mana Contemporary Chicago.

Based on Dahlberg’s essay Tracking the Movements of A Pigeon and Lee’s script for the new animation currently on view, the reading activated the exhibition by bringing multiple voices into the narratives around life, death, and rebirth in the city.

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Body Keeps the Score is an exhibition by New Media Program artist-in-residence Joo Young Lee. Following Cit-e-scape (2017) and Trembling Hill (2018), the exhibition premiers a new computer-generated animation, the third and final episode of Lee’s trilogy reflecting on the themes of memory, violence, and recovery. The animation will be shown beside 3D-printed sculptures and digital prints.

With reference to both Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Goya’s “Disasters of War” series, the animation uses street pigeons as a symbol for resilience. Lee invites the viewer to ponder the possibility of working through trauma by rewriting its score.

Body Keeps the Score is curated by Nicky Ni and runs from June 22–July 7, 2019.

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Caroline Joy Dahlberg is a performer and sensory choreographer. She received her BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014, and her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. She has exhibited work in Richmond, VA, Boston, MA, and Chicago, IL. Dahlberg is the 2018 recipient of the Danhausen Sculpture Fellowship.