Exhibition - Imi Hwangbo: The Diviner Series

Ellen Miller Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Imi Hwangbo's drawings and prints.

Imi Hwangbo’s newest series of prints and constructed drawings envision a threshold to a space of reverie and invention. “The Diviner Series” expresses both unencumbered freedom and refined discipline through the artist's labor-intensive practice.

Hwangbo’s prints are made with the simplest of tools- a pencil, a ruler and evolve slowly over a period of months. Graphite is layered to create rich darks, and the outer perimeter is created with tiny, pointillistic marks. The drawing process is both meditative and illusionistic, mapping time and space. The hand-drawn contrasts with elaborate cut paper mounted in relief. These cut patterns of floating fields of flowers are derived from Korean decorative arts and express desires for longevity, fertility and harmony. The illusionistic drawing combined with the cut paper transforms both formal techniques into a half-real and half-imagined space.

Hwangbo’s constructed drawings are made with translucent mylar that is printed, cut and layered in such quantity that a sculptural work emerges. The design of these works utilizes voids that are sculpted by the edges of the paper, diminishing in size to a just a few millimeters by the final layer. As the image dematerializes both pictorially and physically, it suggests, once again, a moment where the imagined and the real intersect.

Imi Hwangbo is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and received her MFA from Stanford University. Ms. Hwangbo has been the recipient of numerous international artist fellowships, with residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Camargo Foundation in France, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. Her work in constructed drawing has been exhibited at Art on Paper, the Volta Art Fair, the International Print Center, and Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City. Her work has been included in the “Women to Watch” biennial exhibition sponsored by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Group shows include exhibitions at the Jepson Center for the Arts, the Bell Gallery of Brown University, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Atlanta Contemporary ArtCenter. Articles and reviews of her work have appeared in The Huffington Post, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, The Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She is a professor of art at the University of Georgia.

Imi Hwangbo: The Diviner Series will be on view from November 27th - December 21st. The gallery will be open by appointment only from November 27 -December 4th.