See line Gallery presents Spirit Shack, a multimedia performance and installation curated by Janet Levy that includes photography, video, sculpture and sound, the latest collaboration between Todd Gray and Kyungmi Shin with new works conceived from their joint studio in Akwidaa, Ghana.
Spirit Shack refers to the sacred place or room where divine objects, such as masks and ritual drums, reside in West Africa. The performance based installation links aspects of West African shamanic ritual with the mythologies created around contemporary rock stars. Gray and Shin have constructed a divination house within the gallery and will use it in their performance ritual.
The work is influenced by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s writing on Ibo culture as well as the daily experiences Gray and Shin encountered in Western Ghana. In 2005, they started to build their studio with the help of twenty local villagers located in a rural area without paved roads or utilities. While observing some of the customs and rituals in the village they saw parallel patterns in the Dionysian ritual and the life of rock stars. Through the use of fetish objects, trance rhythms, intoxicants and other-worldly communiqués from another place and time, Spirit Shack intersects and joins this phenomenon into a exuberant performance.
Todd Gray and Kyungmi Shin previous collaborations include performance collective project, Art Church (2002, 2003, 2008); multimedia performance, Kumasi Market (2008), and thephotography installation, The Promise of Altered States, on West Blvd between Slauson and Florence, (2009).
Todd Gray received his MFA from Cal Arts in 1989 working primarily with Allan Sekula. Gray’s work explores and transmogrifies his experience of pop culture and imagery into a dark and conceptually challenging vision. Fluent in cultural iconography, driven by introspection, and steeped in issues of corporate politics and racial identity, Todd Gray’s photo-based works and performances are challenging in almost every sense of the word. Exhibitions include MOCA, L.A., Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Smithsonian, Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles,California Museum of Photography, and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Gray maintains studios in Inglewood, California and Akwidaa, Ghana.
Kyungmi Shin is an installation artist whose work weaves the language of sculpture, photography, painting, and video. She studied at San Francisco Art Institute and received her MFA at UC Berkeley. She has exhibited at Sonje Museum in Korea, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, Asian American Art Center in New York,Laguna Beach Museum, Torrance Art Museum, Virginia University Art Museum, and Berkeley Art Museum. She is a recipient of the California Community Foundation emerging artist grant, City of Pasadena, Cultural Affair’s Individual Artist grant, City of Los Angeles Artist in Residence grant, and Durfee grant. Kyungmi Shin works and lives in Inglewood and Ghana.