The Vestibule Gallery, Seattle Presents Bowers: Philippe Hyojung Kim and Chris Lael Larson  

A bower entices with its exterior, inviting the visitor into a retreat, a private place, a garden of Eden or garden of unearthly delight. The bowerbird takes from their environment and weaves a three-dimensional collage, meant to attract. The bower’s exterior hints at the luscious nature of its interior. 

Philippe Hyojung Kim and Chris Lael Larson build bowers of paper and plastic – three-dimensional collage installations. Like Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau grottos, the collages are made from detritus in the artists’ environments. More than assemblages, these works are carefully crafted.

Kim creates installations with neon plastic casts, fragments that break from the casts, and wallpaper with a pattern made from the fragments. He collages in three-dimensions on pegboards and the wall. Kim’s work puts on display current, cultural cognitive dissonance: our pleasure in dangerous, beautiful plastic. 

Larson gathered nude figure studies from an introductory drawing class; he shredded and reused the discarded paper in a three-dimensional collage that can be modified in-situ. He paints and papers spaces to carve out temporary spaces from a temporary material.  

Both artists transform reused materials; Under Larson’s hands, mediocre drawings get a new life. Kim takes a discarded plastic bottle, toy or mouthguard, and reinvents it in the neon casts and the resulting collage. The results are contemporary both in technique and concept.

Their chosen media reflect the detritus in their environment: Plastic and paper are the most and least lasting materials that shape contemporary life. They are vibrant matter, to use Jane Bennett’s terms, shaping the interior and exterior of human and nonhuman world.  Both are disposable, both form the packaging that is the excess exterior of on consumable goods: tempting packaging that surrounds each object before it even achieves use. They are the temporary architecture of consumption and a permanent effect on our environment through their impact on climate.