Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present Uprooted, a two-person exhibition featuring new work by New York based artists, Yuko Oka and Hyungsub Shin. The works in this exhibition look to nature for its movement, transience, and its capacity to be both adaptive and unfamiliar.

Yuko Oda’s drawings and sculptures are inspired by her close observations of natural phenomena. Her new pieces offer a view of a natural world in flux. She has located her newest creations around the diverse cultural significance of the butterfly. Influenced by their mystical symbolisms and their unique natural powers, Oda creates abstracted white and gold butterflies against stormy skies and dark night, the juxtapositions of melancholy, hope, and apocalyptic drifts. Her sculptural series, “The Unbearable Lightness and Heaviness of Being” is created using a rapid prototyping machine to make three-dimensional forms in flight. The resulting sculptures contain conceptual and formal contradictions of the butterfly both aloft and rooted—organic representations of earth and sky, made of synthetic fibers and advanced digital technologies.

Similarly Hyungsub Shin’s work uses artificiality to find the place where nature and culture coincide. His abstracted sculptures and drawings of rhizomes define life in continual flux, expansion by division and fragmentation, and identity within social relationships. Using jute rope, he branches them repeatedly into smaller scale constructs. The result is an evocative sculpture composed of intricate nodes of branches, that depict biological unity. His meticulously rendered works on paper concentrate on brachial forms in walnut ink, gold leaf and watercolor, that are freely drawn and using repeated overlays of stencil.

Yuko Oda’s work has been exhibited in numerous international locations such as Chelsea Art Museum, Annemarie Garden Sculpture and Art Center, RISD Museum, Beijing Today Art Museum, and the Artist Network Gallery. Oda obtained her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and BA from Duke University. She was an art resident at Chashama North, Vermont Studio Center, and School of Visual Arts. She was born in Tokyo, and lives in New York City.

Hyungsub Shin moved to New York in 1997 and received his MFA from the School of Visual Art. He has been showing the site specific works in public spaces including Art Omi’s Fields Sculpture Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, Anyang Public Art Project, Jamaica Flux, as well as, participating in various indoor exhibitions.