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Leeah Joo

March 18, 2005 - April 9, 2005

Andrew Bae Gallery
300 W. Superior St.
Chicago, IL 60610
tel.: 312-335-8601
hours: Tue-Sat 10a-6p
http://www.andrewbaegallery.com/

Korean-born artist Leeah Joo's paintings have a triple life: a sense of inner, outer, and through in these precise figurative renditions of windows and the sights they reveal. Solid in their realism, the windows are at the same time alive, awash with ethereal reflections of the people in the lit rooms within. Since the Renaissance, figurative paintings have employed a convention of the picture frame as window. Joo turns that convention back upon itself, with results well worth seeing.

The windows themselves are solidly-realized; in themselves they tell much of the environment in which they stand, from the folds of a lace curtain, to the graining of the wooden frame or the forbidding mesh of an iron security grating. Some evoke ideas of interior observation, the seer unseen, the protection windows insert between the observer and the observed -- as well as the revelation and the vulnerability of the transparency offered by the glass, which lets through as much as it reflects. In other works, as in Still Here (diptych, acrylic and oil on wood panel: 32 x 24 in. (each painting): 2004), the window, dark without, casts back the images of individuals in the lit room within. They are ghostly and unreal against the window's strong physical presence and often a disjointed in double-reflection as refracted by the double panes of glass. In several paintings the subject looks directly at, or through, the window into the darkened night beyond: the sense of a momentary self-awareness, seeing the reflection of a transient image that will change the instant the person moves or leaves the room. Round with the fecundity of the expectant mother, or with the new wriggling babe in her arms, many of Joo's reflected subjects are women -- mothers and children suggesting both individual experiences, as well as the universality of new life, new bearing.

In the artist's paintings of Korean-style windows, the rice-paper 'panes' form a screen on which only silhouettes can be seen: a heightened sense of privacy, with the gestures played out in shadow form an eloquent statement of emotion and moment. Both types of windows highlight their subjects with a strong sense of narrative, the capturing of an instant of story which the artist further heightens with suggestive titles.

In Joo's art the window casts our own reflections back upon us, even as it exposes our actions to others. Revealing, rife with narrative, twenty-four oil paintings of windows by Leeah Joo will be at Andrew Bae Gallery through April 9, 2005.

--Katherine Rook Lieber

Katherine Rook Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.