Exhibition on view: 06/02 - 06/30/2018
Opening : 06/02/2018, 1-5pm
Venue: FOGSTAND @ St. Paul, MN, USA

Charles Matson Lume is a visual artist whose art is engaged in the pas deux of light and materials. His installations have been exhibited at institutions such as: the Irish Museum of Modern Art, (Dublin, Ireland), Babel Kunst (Trondheim, Norway), and Hunter College, (NYC). He has received fellowships from the Bush Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Charles has participated in artist residencies such as: Nes Artist Residency, Skagastrond, Iceland; Lademoen 
Kunstnerverksteder, Trondheim, Norway; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. He is a Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Stout where he teaches painting, drawing, and aesthetics. In 2013, he was awarded the Outstanding Senior Researcher Award at UW-Stout. Charles lives in Saint Paul, MN, and his art can be found online at the White Columns Artist Registry: http://registry.whitecolumns.org/view_artist.php?artist=11863

Song-yun Kim (born 1978, South Korea) lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Educated BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2005-2008 and MFA Hons) Glasgow School of Art, 2009-2011. Recent Activities: Futureproof : [Some] New Photography in Scotland 2011, Street Level Gallery, Glasgow, UK and Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, UK; MFA International Show, Sommer & Kohl, Berlin, Germany; MFA Degree Show, The Glue Factory, Glasgow, UK.

FOGSTAND is happy to announce the inaugural exhibition at its new U.S.A. location, Finding It or the Gazes, an exhibition that can be characterized as a simple unity of appearing, a hopeful non-thing-like variety. The selected artists—Charles Matson Lume (U.S.A.) and Song-yun Kim (South Korea)—embody, rather differently, creative methods that strive toward a non-conceptual, non-narrativized and, for some involved, non-relational vision of the sensual.

Charles Matson Lume and Song-yun Kim both seem to seek, simultaneously, dis-enclosure from the ever-refining formality of aesthetic description and the indescribable faith bound to their own affinities. A tension that theologian Jean-Luc Marion highlights when analyzing idolatry as an exhaustion of a gaze to withstand resting within designation, namely that of the divine brought into being. An inevitable rest that marks—idolic—a moment of an exhausted wonderment, thought or vision no longer capable of pushing through any particular given toward the pure givenness of the world.

No longer transpiercing itself, the gaze no longer pierces things, no longer sees them in transparency; at a certain point, it no longer experiences things as transparent—insufficiently weighted down by light and glory—and a last one finally presents itself as visible, splendid, and luminous enough to be the first to attract, capture, and fill it. This first visible will offer, for each gaze and in the measure of its scope, its idol. Idol—or the gaze’s landing place.

Charles Matson Lume’s material outcomes are something akin to a materialized form of a gerund, the process of adding -ing to a noun, making it a verb. Lume’s approach to light as a medium jostles two sets of interrelated conditionals: light & the lit and subject & the subjected. In most cases, due in no small part to all his work being done in dedication, the subject inevitably rises to the top. However, like oil sitting atop water, we still catch a glimpse of the suspension, made possible by ordinary objects subjected into becoming subjects by way of being lit in a manner that wonders about light, itself.

Song-yun Kim’s photographic images approach an intersection between two modulating instruments —the eye and the aperture—and the inherent, yet ordinary discomposing of each onto the other. Song-yun Kim’s photographic images appear merely to occupy various spaces incidentally, yet an unreachable attentiveness undermines the disparity. This stateliness or restraint is the result of a laborious shooting process. A process which—no matter how arbitrary the subject of the image could seem—is articulated through hundreds of successive refinements made possible by the technical abilities of the camera. Within the passing of time and the successive permeations of a single image relayed via the near instantaneity of the digital display, Song-yun Kim’s images revive, diaphanously, a reified occupation of merely directing sight.

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Photo credit by Song-yun Kim