ASPEN, COLO.- Heji Shin’s America: Part One presents newly commissioned photographs by Heji Shin (b. 1976, Seoul, Korea), an artist based between New York City and the Catskill Mountains. Over the past decade, Shin has generated indelible images that refract and consequently shape visual culture. Previous series include images of crowning babies, screeching roosters, infamous popstars and jocular pigs. Vitality assumes unexpected forms within this exhibition, which features photographs of rockets in mid-air and waves crashing on rocky shoreline. In the summer of 2024, Shin embedded herself within a community of photographers of rocket launches in and around Cape Canaveral, Florida, and gained access to launches and test sites as a member of NASA’s press corps. Within an adjacent gallery are photographs of waves taken on the eve of a hurricane. The axial logic of the exhibition presents a nation seen through its periphery, with disparate atmospheric pressures. These are elemental images in which air and fire, sea and earth command attention. Gravity, too, presides over Shin’s scenes of surges and escape.
Shuang Li: I’m Not
November 20, 2024–March 2, 2025
I’m Not is the first institutional solo exhibition by artist Shuang Li (b. 1990, Wuyi Mountains, China), featuring sculpture and video installations, commissioned in partnership with New York’s Swiss Institute. Li’s work explores how language, relationships and identities are formed and mediated through screens and the internet. For I’m Not, Li delves into her own life as a fan to ruminate on how these technologies inform the social bonds and materiality of fandom, and the complexities of building a world predicated on a fervent love of something distant. Growing up in a small town in Southeast China, Li became (and remains) an ardent fan of My Chemical Romance, a band that introduced the possibility of subcultural belonging as well as the English language into the artist’s life. MCR fandom unfolds as a case study in the exhibition for an examination of faraway bodies and displaced desires.
ugo rondinone: the rainbow body
December 12, 2024–March 30, 2025
ugo rondinone: the rainbow body is the artist’s (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) first major institutional show in the Western United States in a career spanning over three decades. The museum’s second-floor gallery is recast as a prismatic arena where fluorescent, lifelike sculptures of dancers sit at rest and in waiting. In his practice at large, Rondinone is celebrated for expansive installations, working with photography, painting, poetry, outdoor sculpture, and neon rainbow signage. His visual vocabulary often incorporates the natural and primordial world, wherein rocks, clouds, trees, and the sun are recurrent motifs. Language and systems of communication such as lyrics or slogans mark other modes of exploring human subjectivity and experience.
Megan Marrin: Austerity
December 12, 2024–February 23, 2025
Austerity is the first institutional solo exhibition by Megan Marrin (b. St. Louis, MO), an artist based in New York City’s East Village. Across five paintings, Marrin summons Jean-Michel Frank (1895–1941), a French interior designer (or, more appropriately, ensemblier) whose domestic environments evince a fixation with simplicity, perfection, and stripped-back elegance. Frank is credited with signaling a break from the dense, saturated living spaces of the Victorian era, and instead embracing a “passion for absence” that became celebrated amongst the aesthetes of the interwar period in Europe and influenced subsequent generations of tastemakers and designers including Jacques Grange and the late Jed Johnson after his rediscovery in the 1970s. Frank’s worldview is distilled by Marrin, who presents scenes from a Frank-designed bathroom, bedroom, and a careful study of a wardrobe amongst other paintings.
