Distilled: Michael Joo

This fall, Korean-American sculptor Michael Joo will inaugurate a large-scale installation entitled Still Lives. As a preview to the unveiling, Anton Kern Gallery will put on a concise presentation of one new sculpture by Joo entitled Distilled, starting September 8, 2005.

Distilled is Joo’s fourth solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery. As the title indicates, Distilled is a companion piece to the extensive sculptural installation to be presented later this fall, but it also is a companion piece in a deeper, more personal sense; this work has been up in the artist’s studio for the past two years, slowly evolving, almost organically growing and changing in the presence of a developing, wide-ranging body of work. Joo uses hand-built-plastic to cover a variety of objects, from household articles to taxidermy models, giving these items a new, highly tactile and sensual skin; in other words, Joo neutralizes their disparate origins, the animal world, the domestic sphere, and the medical field, conceiving of a new animated hybrid world.