Thursday, January 4, 2007

Exhibit Review: Yoon Choo’s Nuclear Family

By Laura Seewoester

Yoon Choo's mixed media exhibit, Nuclear Family, at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art was a good approach to something usually boring and hard to represent in a visually stimulating manner. Choo had photographs of daily suburban life with cut outs in bright yellow of a child, toys, tools, etc. pasted over the image. The subjects are performing regular, every day tasks such as painting the walls or working in the garden. It conveyed the simplicity and conformity of life in suburbia. There were also similar images being projected onto a wall. The subjects and cutouts would fade and reappear, and eventually there were almost too many yellow cut outs to even see the photograph behind them. Instead of using detailed photographs of indivual persons, she uses cutout silhouettes of bodies, erasing the individual identity of the subjects in order to represent a more generalized sense of familial settings. The subjects could be my neighbors, my parents, or maybe even me one day.

It's a little depressing coming from my perspective, a young professional with no children yet, doing exactly what I want to do 85 percent of the time. Is this where I am headed once I pop out a few babies and move further away from the city? On the other hand, looking at these images you see a life that's pleasant, safe, and somewhat bustling. While the cookie cutter thing is a little obvious, it makes the point loud and clear. Just because life looks the same from one house to the next, it doesn't mean it is the same. What a person fills their life with is where we all differ. Choo's exhibit is a little plain, if nothing else solely because of the subject matter, however nothing this "plain" has ever given me with so much to think about.

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Comments

John Meyer Staff

Laura, I agree - this is thought-provoking stuff. I choose to interpret it that one can fall into the cookie-cutter mold, or go one's own way - thus the "real people" in the midst of others not so real. (But then, I've always been an optimist.)

Your photos provide a valuable accompaniment to the text, particularly for those of us who probably won't get out to the exhibit.

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