Installation view © Leekyung Kang

The Hope College De Pree Art and Gallery will host the multimedia exhibition “Ecstasy on the Surface,” featuring work by the college’s 2019 Borgeson Artist-in-Residence, Leekyung Kang, from Wednesday, Aug. 21, through Friday, Sept. 27.

Kang will deliver an artist’s talk on the exhibition’s final day, Friday, Sept. 27, at 4 p.m. in Cook Auditorium of the De Pree Art Center and Gallery. A closing reception will follow in the gallery on Friday, Sept. 27, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

The public is invited to the exhibition, artist’s talk and closing reception.  Admission to each is free.

Leekyung Kang creates spatial illusions by capturing unseen architectural spaces between the second and third dimensions. Influenced by her training as a painter and printmaker, the work focuses on the materiality of each medium.  In the exhibition at Hope, she applies to the digital realm her ongoing interest challenging the conventional understanding of space that focuses on physical state, history and transformation.

“For the past few years, I have been obsessed with the structural framework and components that make up the urban landscape,” Kang said.  “My work has focused on exploring both exterior surfaces and interior infrastructure of the cities I have lived in, including architectural imagery of unfinished scaffold facades through mixed media. The goal of this work is to expose the unseen and hidden spaces by capturing the raw and unfinished state of our present environment.”

“Recently, through the exploration of digitized surfaces, my perception and perspective of reality has been altered.  When navigating the digital world, I often wonder what actually lies beneath the web cursor. The seamless surface does not reveal the infrastructure of the hidden space, nor can one see the materiality and responses of data components in ‘real time,’” Kang noted.  “In my work, I attempt to excavate each layer and explore the unseen space by rearranging components through digital language manipulation and photo editing.”

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