Laurie Kang

A Body Knots

May 5–June 9, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 5, 2:00–5:00pm

A Body Knots is a new site-responsive installation by Laurie Kang that coalesces several threads of the Toronto-based artist’s research into studies of genetics, science fiction, feminist theory, and her personal and cultural history. Kang considers how these discourses impact our understandings of bodies as entities that are individual and situated yet share micro-level blueprints.

Most known for her camera-less images, Kang deliberately misuses photographic materials in order to highlight their expansive nature, allowing them to perpetually evolve in relation to their environment. Bringing light-sensitive photographic papers into relation with organic materials, darkroom chemicals, and uncontrolled natural light, each image is processed without fixative, allowing her work to remain continually sensitive.

With A Body Knots, photographs are supported by a large-scale apparatus that exists somewhere between sculpture, architecture, and skeleton. By turning her images into responsive skins—stretching across an industrial body of metal and rubber—Kang produces moments of encounter between sculpture and photography, surface and flesh, bodies and environments. Foregrounding a deeply receptive and intuitive approach to collaborating with matter, A Body Knots works to expand our thinking about what constitutes a body.

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Biography

Laurie Kang (b. 1985, Toronto) works in photography, sculpture, installation, and video. Kang has exhibited internationally at Topless, New York; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Cooper Cole, 8-11, The Loon, and Franz Kaka, Toronto; L’inconnue, Montreal; Carl Louie, London; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw, Poland; Raster Gallery, Warsaw; Camera Austria, Graz, Austria; and Tag Team, Bergen, Norway. She was recently artist in residence at Tag Team; Rupert, Vilnius; The Banff Centre, Alberta; and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn. Kang lives and works in Toronto and holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit
Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit
Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit
Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit

Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit
Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit
Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit
Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit

Laurie Kang, <em>A Body Knots</em>, 2018. Unfixed, unprocessed photographic paper and darkroom chemicals (continually sensitive), duratrans, magnets, flex track, steel studs, airline cable, hardware. Documentation: Jimmy Limit
Laurie Kang, <em> Self Fermenting With</em>, 2018. Stainless steel mixing bowls, pigmented silicone, polymer clay, cast aluminum peach pits, cast aluminum lotus roots, spilled aluminum, jade shield pills. Documentation: Jimmy Limit