Jean Shin and Brian Ripel: Unlocking

Jean Shin sees value in the things most of us discard. She creates elaborate and dynamic sculptures and installations using immense accumulations of materials ranging from empty plastic prescription pill bottles, to losing lottery tickets, to forgotten trophies and draws meaning from these materials and reformats them in order to call attention to the complex social contexts these materials conjure.

For the upcoming exhibition, SMoCA has invited Shin and long time collaborator Brian Ripel to spend time researching our local community and create new artwork. The project will focus on something we all possess—keys. Shin and Ripel have discovered an uncanny visual relationship between the horizontal profile of traditional keys and the Arizona landscape. Keys offer up a range of social meaning; much can be gleaned about trust and intimacy when we examine the range of people with whom we share our keys. Shin and Ripel will map a vast network (both personal and professional) of people based on the keys they share. In addition to creating artwork modeling this interconnected network of individuals, Shin and Ripel will also involve the community by collecting old keys that people no longer use. These keys hold yet additional meaning, hinting at places that we once inhabited but for one reason or another remain attached to emotionally, the lost spaces we all have in our lives. The end result of both the mapping and collecting activities will build on this visual connection to the landscape and take multiple forms in the space of the exhibition from drawing and sculpture to video projection. It will offer multiple perspectives on the ways in which we are connected to one another and will reveal layers of meaning embedded in the social community and the physical environment that we share.

Shin has exhibited at preeminent American art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Ripel is an architect and founder of RSVP Architecture Studio. He has won numerous awards, most recently Interior Design magazine's "Best of Year Merit Award, Casual Restaurant” and a 2010 New York State Council for the Arts Independent Project Grant.