About — Rob Rhee

Bio.

Rob Rhee is an artist, writer and an Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Visual Art program at the University of Washington. His work has been exhibited locally at the Portland Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Hedreen Gallery, and the Sarah Spurgeon Gallery at Central Washington University. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at the Hunterdon Art Museum, White Columns, the Fort Worth Contemporary Gallery and the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, as well as in the 10th Berlin Biennale, the 2011 Changwon Biennale, and at the Ilmin Museum of Art, in Seoul, South Korea. In 2018 he was awarded the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Art and was nominated for a Stranger Genius award in 2016. His blog, Tabletop, was Short-Listed for an Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation and his critical writing on art has been published in Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Arcade, Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters, and La Norda.

News.

Bumbershoot: Arts and Music Festival: August 31 & September 1, 2024.

PNCA, Summer Lecture Series: https://www.youtube.com/live/S5pRfS9I7_s?feature=shared

Excerpts.

“Humans have been cultivating gourds since time immemorial—beginning around 13,000 BCE, some say—and all this time, we have actually been breeding them to look more like us. We have coaxed gourds into increasingly curvaceous, swollen shapes to create mirror images of our own unruly bodies. In his sculptures, Rhee frequently splices, recombines, and encloses gourds in metal armatures around and within which they grow…Fascinatingly, it is through his interventions that thwart and redirect the gourds’ growth that he is able to show us these plants at their most human. It is seeing the gourds’ “natural” shape limited by his sculptural enclosures that produces in me an empathic pang—the perception of the gourd as a fellow freedom-seeking creature.

Rhee’s work comes at a critical moment because, after years of teaching gourds how to behave like humans, I believe we now need them to teach us how to remain human. Over the years, these organisms have become repositories for our values and for the way we might like to see ourselves: idiosyncratically formed by experience, adept at transforming inevitable limitation into scaffolding for growth, deviating wherever possible from the straight, narrow and expected. Rhee’s gourd sculptures reflect back to us the importance of being pliable, adaptable, grounded in the physical world, independent in our thinking, resilient and ample. These are values worth remembering as virtual spaces encroach upon our physical experience, our sense of place, our feelings of interconnectedness to one another, our accountability for our actions.”

- Sally Scopa
(Introduction) “I am a Blasted Tree,” Queen Projects. May 23 - June 24, 2024
https://www.queennorthwest.com

Reed, Patrick J., “10th Berlin Biennale, We Don’t Need Another Hero,” e-flux. June 11, 2018.

“On a nearby plastic barrel—the kind used for storing rainwater, trash, and bodies dissolved in lye—sit several small gourds unnaturally bound in their growth by intricate metal cages. The gourds are quiet dedications to the body in pain…” 

Rines, Ellie, “Stomach Acid Reflux,” White Columns (online). Nov. 4 – Jan. 27, 2018.

“Stomach Acid Reflux, an online inventory that deals with the human body in a way that is somehow both grotesque and formally elegant. Traditional themes–still life, formal abstraction–and traditional composition–symmetry, etc…– i.e. artistic practice of control is confounded by dysfunction and absurdity.

Robert Rhee in Coral uses a spray foam can to create a bizarre yellow foam shape. Rhee discusses “rubber necking” in his artist statement. This could have been another title for my online selection of works — looking at something gross and candid out of habit and curiosity.” 

Filipowska, Roksana, “On Plasticity and Plate Tectonics,” Grizzlyx2 (blog). Feb. 22, 2017.

“Rob Rhee is a sculptor who rarely sculpts. Instead, Rhee engages in bricolage; he gathers disparate materials, rearranges them, and coordinates the conditions that make their transformation possible...Bricolage crop-cum-artwork introduces a slippage between the terms “make” and “grow,” repositioning the artist as a harvester and collaborator with nature, rather than a solitary creator of a work of art…”

Graves, Jen, “Into his Gourds,” The Stranger (COVER), Seattle, WA, Vol. 25, Nov. 2015.

“Each cage was meant to intervene in the expression of that particular type of seed's DNA. The cage, in the final sculpture, becomes an observable force. You see the clash between the gourd that the gourd's genes set out to make and the gourd as it actually grew. Nature versus (constricting) nurture. It all hints at the presence of invisible forces like weather, chance, timing, the elements of any life. Rhee's new gourd hybrids wear cages that remember and visualize their histories. They also combine industrialized, agricultural, standardized growth with the kind of personal attention that defines "heirlooms," plants tended and brought forward through time by individuals rather than large-scale operations…

I can still recall exactly what I felt when I first saw one of the gourds, last summer. It was like hallucinating. Those metal cage fingers indenting the gourd indented my flesh. It was the same feeling I got in a gallery in Rome when I first came face-to-face with Gian Lorenzo Bernini's 1622 marble sculpture The Rape of Proserpina. The god Pluto's fingers are gripping the upper thigh of Proserpina as she tries, futilely, to escape him. Those fingers on that thigh—just that fragment—tell the same story of the gourd, about the desire to be free from forces that can't be understood, predicted, or controlled, or the simple longing at least to see those forces' hands at work.”

Excerpt: Manitach, Amanda, “Q&A: The Art of Bound Fruit,” City Arts, Seattle, WA, Nov. 4, 2015.

What does “Winter Wheat” mean? The title relates to ideas of monoculture [the practice of cultivating a single crop in the same area for long periods, eventually depleting the soil]. Particularly working with gourds, a lot of what happens in the work is about the desire to control and the tension that exists between control and chance. I see monoculture as this weird situation where success eventually leads to failure…

And then you have [the Sedōka poems]. It’s continuing the subject of dialog…Almost all the poems I start with are about meeting points between different kinds of minds and people. Sedōka is referred to as a dialogue poem, or exchange poem. I’ve written many of these by now, but in preparation for this show I started with the phrase the useful makes itself known, and for some reason Google Translate has gotten extremely baroque in its translation and re-translation of it. I think I’ve run it through Translate 150 times now and it’s almost a page long. It’s literally started asking itself questions and answering them, adding new subjects, names, entities. It just went crazy.

Almost like some kind of AI? A lot of times when we talk about artificial intelligence we think about some threshold of hardware or technology. But I was wondering if there’s something about empathy involved. If I give a computer a task to do and it makes a mistake, I’m like oh, stupid computer, you’re a fool. But I know in my personal life mistakes have been very useful and productive in my process. You make a mistake, but you realize that mistake is something much more correct than anything else you meant to accomplish. Maybe that’s about respecting a mind. I don’t know. For me, acting out these somewhat silly translations to the best of my ability is a way of experimenting with the process of respect. I wonder, what does it feel like to act as if this thing has a mind that I respect?