Keun Young Park + Karen Mainenti
Schools of fish—once unthinkable in Gowanus canal water—fling over its surface by the Union Street Bridge. A vast sky envelopes you with rows of glass and metal towers in the distance. You’re a few blocks east of the Brooklyn Art Cluster, one of many locations featured in this year’s Gowanus Open Studios weekend.
The Cluster Gallery, a subterranean space shared by creatives spanning disciplines, displays work made by its community. A disembodied hand, shifting from pale green to ultramarine, is a striking symbol among the constellation on one wall. Closer inspection reveals thousands of pinhead-sized paper bits that reconstruct the extremity, torn and set manually into an elaborate skin-like mosaic.
Keun Young Park’s photo collages fragment the figure into essential parts: heads, hands, arms, torsos, legs, feet. Each model’s gesture is lyrically composed, and her methodically applied material trembles in space, seemingly susceptible to a gust that would quickly undo the order. Park’s work cycles somewhere between life’s beginning and end—the delicacy of each state ever-present.
Expanding the metaphorical and geographical reach of Arts Gowanus, Karen Mainenti welcomes visitors into her Spaceworks NYC studio and the Ground Floor Gallery in neighboring Park Slope. Her exhibition Message in a Bottle converts the latter into an upscale boutique dedicated to an exercise in contradiction: the faithful embrace of self-optimization versus skepticism for the alchemy of beauty products.
Mainenti translates historical marketing slogans for the social media age, transforming them into pithy statements slathered in satire like thick night cream. “Have you lost touch with your skin?” worries a golden text. Porcelain shaped like Aveda, Kiehl’s, L’Oreal, Neal’s Yard packages punctuate fleshy pink walls and elaborate tablescapes throughout the gallery. Their impenetrable pastel casings pulse with noxious possibility. If you let reason succumb to belief in marketing and merchandise, “You can actually feel yourself becoming more beautiful.”
11/29/2019