Jaye Rhee: Once Called Future
Tapping into nostalgia and yearning as overlapping modes of time travel, Rhee sets out to uncover the mechanics of memory and imagination
Tapping into nostalgia and yearning as overlapping modes of time travel, Rhee sets out to uncover the mechanics of memory and imagination
Jaye Rhee / Once Called Future / 2019 / three-channel video / 7min 12sec
Recasting obstinate love and failed utopias as imagined futures, Once Called Future employs the lens of the past to question and provoke an examination of our present. Fascinated by the way mid-century retro-futuristic designs capture past visions of what was to come, Jaye Rhee was particularly drawn to Futuro House, designed in 1968 by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. “I saw this architectural object as an emblem of a future: one that has been lost, is still to come, or will never come, yet has already vanished into the past. The future as the 'not here/not now' is a metonymic substitute for that other time and space.”
Filmed in Royse City and Corsicana, two small towns in Texas where Rhee discovered an abandoned Futuro House and a number of NASA training vehicles, Once Called Future seeks to uncover the mechanics of memory and imagination, and how they create a meaningful present. Here, Rhee traces the act of searching for an unattainable utopia with Futuro House as a mediating vehicle, mapping misconception and miscommunication onto a kind of yearning, be it for the “future” itself or for feeling a certain sentiment.
About Jaye Rhee
Jaye Rhee revels in the space between the ironic and the poignant with work that simultaneously incorporates video, photography, and performance. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Rhee lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited at multiple venues and events including the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), Norton Museum of Art (Palm Beach), Albright Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), Queens Museum (New York), Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Kobe Biennale (Kobe), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul), CAAA (Guimaraes), and La Triennale di Milano (Milan) . Pieces by Rhee can be found in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, High Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Seoul Museum of Art, Suwon Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Koo House Museum of Art & Design, SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation, and Leeum Samsung Museum of Art.
