Artists
Naomi Chung
This body of work captures a unique, stylized representation of nature. Rather than a pictorial account, the paintings offer a multi-sensational experience and a glimpse into the underlying forces at work in the landscape. Intense color, lines, and shapes that are sometimes sharply defined and other times evocative aim to elicit visceral responses beyond the visual. In an attempt to capture the full spectrum of a constantly evolving world, I broke down the constraints that a still landscape offers and opted for compositions and environments that appeared to be a constant state of flux. As colors and shapes alternate under light and shadow, a rhythm to the return to abstraction allowed me to immerse myself in the nuances of the painting process, exploring a variety of applied textures, the use of unnatural color, and their relationships to one another in unconventional compositions. As I freed myself from the limitations of identifiable imagery, I became more interested in shifting the viewer's focus from familiarity and recognizable to that of mystification and disorientation.
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Through the dramatization of a non-human viewer such as an insect or a bird, I imagined the lens from which they might experience the world. The perceptions of color might be skewed toward the ultraviolet range and smells, temperatures, directional winds and cosmic forces might become more prominent. These elements of nature seem to function as survival mechanisms or roadmaps that help animals navigate their way as an integral part of an interconnected network of life. The same elements served as inspiration to the compositions of my paintings. Interactions of shapes and colors shifted with every brushstroke and conceptions of scale and space remain uncertain. Contradictions between detail and ambiguity were also at play as emotions or instincts sometimes became responsible for the distortion of imagery.