'Vignettes: Paintings by Leeah Joo' at Peeler Art Center October 5-November 6

September 29, 2005

Also: 'Material Minutiae' of New Orleans Artist Sally Heller, August 24-December 4; Also: 'Figures of Thinking: Convergences in Contemporary Cultures,' September 14-December 4

September 29, 2005, Greencastle, Ind. - "Vignettes: Paintings by Leeah Joo," an exhibition that depicts quiet glimpses of people’s lives through windows, opens at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on October 5, 2005. Free and open to the public, the art will remain on display through November 6. (at left: Circadian Slippage, 2005, acrylic/canvas, 54" x 58")

Korean-born painter Leeah Joo’s narrative paintings are set through the frames of windows. Windows are architecture’s built-in picture frames -- cropping our views, casting our shadows on their curtains and screens, and reflecting our image in their glass. Portraying both traditional Korean-paper screen and American double-hung glass windows, Joo’s detailed paintings place us at the edge of these frames to peer into abridged intimate moments. Her work depicts silhouettes cast against paper screens like a puppet play -- a view out a window reveling a suburban neighborhood at dusk while simultaneously reflecting the artist standing in the kitchen, and venetian blinds obscuring the goings-on in a bedroom. Narratives surrounding the figures are interrupted and veiled by their quotidian domestic surroundings. Like an innocuous voyeur or peeping tom, the viewer is placed outside stranger’s windows or dropped into their living rooms as a surprise guest, embarrassedly averting the resident’s gazes by looking out the window. (at right: Fortune Teller, 2004, oil/acrylic/canvas, 40" x 40")

Leeah Joo’s skill with paint is evident in her intricate depiction of reflections on glass and trompe-l’oeil lace curtains. But just as the rigid structure of a window serves as a portal through which to view domestic life, the formal aspects and skill behind Joo’s work are ways to enter and explore human drama and narrative. Joo states, “In the process of arriving at these images, under the guise of exploring formal pictorial language, life experiences culminate to a level of clarity unavailable to me in any other form.”

Leeah Joo received her BFA in Painting and Art History from Indiana University (1994) and her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art (1996). Her work has been exhibited at the Seoul Art Center, Seoul Korea; H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; the Wichita Center for the Arts, Wichita, KS; the Michael Cross Gallery, Kansas, City; and the Andrew Bae Gallery, Chicago. She was an assistant professor in paintings at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO from 1998 to 2004. (at left: Before B. and After B., 2005, acrylic/canvas, 60" x 40")

The artist will attend and speak at an opening reception, Wednesday, October 12 from 4 to 6 p.m. at Peeler Art Center.

The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information, call (765) 658-4822 or click here.

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