Full Gorge

Visitor Welcome Center presents Full Gorge, a solo exhibition of new work by Pearl C. Hsiung.

Hsiung's paintings invoke landscapes formed by gigantic pressures within the earth’s crust. Often times, depending on the process of plate tectonics, parts of streams and rivers form waterfalls, which over time, erode rock layers and collapse river beds, thereby creating a gorge. Her painting process mimics the entropic activities of natural erosion and geological uplifts that drastically alter land matter. For instance, paint is smeared and dragged vertically exploding the visible horizon, color gradients hint at the transformative possibilities within crevices, flattened surfaces reorient the geological order of a natural artifice. Hsiung's painted metamorphoses reference the geological and situates it within the bodily. For Hsiung, gorges are also sites of swallowing, purging, and crying, processes that are deeply dependent on one's own catharsis. The result is raw. Here, the landscapes implode into the immersive, flooding and devouring our senses.

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Pearl C. Hsiung's painting, installation and video works explore states of physical, psychical and metaphysical metamorphosis. Often these transformations play out in anthropomorphizing landscapes verging on portraiture, where the geological and biological collide and collapse, raising questions about the nature of nature. Hsiung's video works bring these ideas out into an order of social space, beyond the pictorial plane, to further investigate the mediation of social life, nature and constructed images in an endlessly transforming universe. Pearl C. Hsiung received her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles (1997) and her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London (2004). Hsiung has had solo exhibitions at Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles (2017), Human Resources, Los Angeles (2014), Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College (2011); Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2007, 2010); and Max Wigram Gallery, London (2006, 2004). Hsiung's work has been featured in group exhibitions including Second Wave, UCR Artsblock (2016); Made In L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Westwood; Bitch Is The New Black, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2009); Acclimatation, Villa Arson, France (2008); Humor Us, Los Angeles Municipal Arts Gallery (2007); 2006 California Biennial and Disorderly Conduct: Art in Tumultuous Times (2008) both at the Orange County Museum of Art; 2006 Busan Biennale, South Korea and Expander, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, London (2005).