Passport in hand and GPS in car, I crossed the river into Newton. The quest was to see The Two Silences of Heaven and Earth, an exhibition of photos and paintings by Sung Won Yun at the Andover Newton Theological School. Not a place that’s on my regular schedule of visitation. Traffic was biblical but the Andover Newton Theological School was quiet and deserted, and the Wilson Chapel was clean and well-lighted, glazed without being glassy.
To say that this photo of one of two of Yun’s paintings on view doesn’t do it justice doesn’t really do justice to the idiom “doesn’t do justice to” but since it’s all I took and I can’t find anything online, it should give you an idea and perhaps send you to Newton to see it for yourself.
The botanical and cellular imagery exists at a scale that requires you to get right up close to the painting (thankfully its not glazed like the photos) which is well worth doing. It reminds me of some of the work in the DeCordova’s show Drawn to Detail, blogged here at limeduck almost exactly a year ago. To quote from the artist’s statement,
These recent works create micro-organisms that seem to float in their own universe, a spatial construction with infinite temporal layers found in all organisms, spanning from a primordial period to the present moment. Such a trajectory suggests an apparently infinite arc of time. As the layers accumulate, meaning emerges and finds a new integration which points to an overarching synthesis. I feel the same event happening repeatedly in time, creating new meanings: the micro-organism, portrayed as floating in an infinite universe, interacts with a dynamic trajectory linking past, present, and future.
Also on view were several photographs of Iceland which were subtle and beautiful, playing with the reflectivity of water and the scale of the Icelandic landscape. I hope to see more of Yun’s work sometime, maybe in a more accessible setting more amenable to showing photographs.
Hungry from art-peeping and at sea in Newton, I let the GPS bring me back to Bread and Lily, where I was rewarded with a delicious roasted salmon dish with a salad of green apples and lettuce.
Against my better judgement, I also indulged in a peanut butter iced cupcake with a reeses cup embedded in the top. It was gone before I even thought about photographing it. Owner Ben Cutler was friendly and helpful as ever, touting B&L’s new Fall menu. Well worth the detour on a perfect New England Fall day.