Jae-Eun Suh
Artist Bio
Jae-Eun Suh is a multidisciplinary artist from Austin, Texas, currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in New Media at the University of North Texas. Suh uses digital images and projection to create reconstructed compositions by layering. She utilizes both analog and digital methods of production and her work process conveys the fallibility of memory. She recently received the Talley Dunn Gallery Equity In The Arts Fellowship and her work has been shown at the Centre Culturel et Littéraire Jean Giono in Manosque, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Gimpo, South Korea, and The MAC in Dallas.
Artist Statement
My work portrays a sense of longing for what is inaccessible and out of reach. Physical and emotional disconnection from others is depicted as physical distance over space and time. My work reflects my personal experiences as a Korean American having lived in South Korea, France, and the United States at different time of my life. I begin my research by looking at photo and video archives of my local or transcontinental travel history, and the resulting patterns and images that connote both place and passage. The visual elements of that data are fragmented and then reconstructed into a new form. Those layered and collaged elements portray the way that memories are fractured and altered.
In my process, digital technology serves as a bridge between the sculptural, physical, virtual, and viewer’s sensorial experience. Technology also conveys the concept of telepresence that helps us maintain our relationships and communication with others despite distance. I work in a variety of media — video projection, sculpture, computational image-making, 3D scanning, sound, and installation. Videos projected onto objects and architecture portray times of transition, with abstracted and fragmented images that are either temporarily or permanently still. With the manipulation of playback speed in moving images, my work encourages both
active and intimate interaction.
Layer adds and removes specificity and visualizes dualities — tangible and intangible; clear and hazy; large and small; intimate and distant. Audiences encounter a new inventive landscape, somewhere that is unidentifiable and reconstructed from the collected visual and topographical information. These recreated places hold sentimental value, but I hope they encourage the viewers to puzzle out these fragments, interpret spatial values, and make connections to their own lived experiences.
