Jean Shin is known for transforming the mundane into poetic meditations on materiality. Discarded objects, from used clothes and broken umbrellas to worn-out shoes and old eyeglasses, are amassed, deconstructed, and reassembled by Shin through a labor-intensive process that hints at the objects’ former function. What remains is a visually compelling and psychologically powerful transformation of life’s leftovers.

For her second solo show at Frederieke Taylor Gallery, Jean Shin presents Key Promises, an installation consisting of hundreds of deconstructed computer key caps that wrap around the gallery walls. The otherwise banal computer command keys are transformed by Shin into a playful concrete poem. The text both metaphorically constructs and follows the viewer’s path through the architecture of the gallery from the entrance to the exit: Esc, pause/break, Shift, Insert, Enter, Clear, Space, Insert, Control, Alt, Option, Help, End, Return, Home.

Also on view will be a two channel video installation titled, Duet, in which two keyboards appear to play a duet of virtual correspondence the rhythm of which is set by the distinctive sounds of tapping on a computer keyboard. Like the keys on a player piano, the computer keys endlessly rise and fall in a video loop like pistons.

“These works are particularly resonant at the moment when advances in technology have made e-mail today’s most prevalent mode of communication…Jean Shin has distilled this object that allows us to communicate globally…and reconfigured it in a way that calls attention to the physicality of the act of typing, emphasizing the relationship of the body to language.” -Lorie Mertes

The works on view were created in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, during her artist residency. A related, large-scale, interactive sculpture, TEXTile is currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati exhibition, “New Media/New Materials: Highlights in Contemporary Art from the Fabric Workshop and Museum”, through April 15th, 2007.