encased | january 11 - february 08, 2003

Scissors, Paper, stone (and glue,too)
Globe and Mail | Gallery Going | February 03, 2003
By GARY MICHAEL DAULT

Scissors, paper, stone (and glue, too)

Viewed from across the gallery, these benches and tables by In-Sun Kim simply look like solid, well-proportioned benches and tables. Their soft grey Finish lends them, from across the gallery, a stone-like feel. And as you get closer to them, and you start to see the insistent grain of their surfaces, you begin to wonder if these Shaker-like furniture-objects have perhaps been carved from marble?

Then comes the revelation: They're made of newspapers. In order to fabricate these extraordinary pieces for Encased, her sparse and

exquisitely designed exhibition at Toronto's Peak Gallery, the Korea-born artist, who now lives and works in Kitchener, Ont., has worked long and hard, relentlessly gluing together layer after layer of newspaper until, amazingly, she finds herself with blocks of the stuff thick enough to cut and sand and build from. The surfaces of her laboriously contrived slabs of lumber-like material swirl like marbleized paper (the gallery defty refers to their patterning as a "combination of the predetermined and the accidental") and sometimes you can still find whole patches of newsprint that have surfaced in the sanding process and are then, just as quickly, occluded again. Given the authoritative tone and elegant timbre of what I was able to read in the furniture, I'd wager that Kim had used The Globe and Mail all the way!

This is recycling raised to sublimity.

You can enjoy Kim's furniture at the elemental level, simply marvelling at her skill in designing and building these satisfyingly stalwart pieces from what is more or less nothing.

But you can also go further with them, seeing her mutely eloquent objects as repositories of emptied and exhausted discourse, as inscrutable time-capsules, as reliquaries of the present, quietly made up of what had so recently been urgency.

$1,100-$7,000. Until Feb. 8,23 Morrow Ave, Toronto: 416 537 8108