Michael Joo at MIT List Visual Arts Center

This first museum observe of the Korean-American artist Michael Joo was organized by means of the List Visual Arts Center and curated by dint of its director, Jane Farver. Joo who was born in Ithaca, NY in 1966 exhibited South Korea with Do-Ho Suh in the 2001 Venice Biennale. The rife exhibition consists of around 60 pieces dating from 1991 to 2003 About half are works upon paper; the rest are statuary installation and video, including a major fresh work, Circannual Rhythm (pibloktok), 2003 which was commissioned through the List and premiered there.

A 25-minute, three-channel DVD projection synchronized upon one long screen, Circannual harmonious flow (pibloktok) consists of a narrative documentary, a fictional scenario and an ersatz biology field shoot forward The first segment shows portions of Joo's solitary 400-mile walk along the gravel road that tread on the heels ofs the Alaska pipeline to the Arctic Circle. No decked-out trekker Joo wears public way clothes and carries a plastic shopping bag, looking colder and more exhausted as he journeys north. In an ambiguous climactic sight he meets a man and tries to hold intercourse with him, but hits the language barrier. This launches the nearest more confusing segment, in which a collection of Inuit actors plot with diagrams and then gather around single character who has a seizure in the snow. In the final following the screen fills with a close-up of a wolf's head, tugging at what gazes like prey. Wall text explains that Joo rigged a camera inside an embalmed caribou carcass, left it in the groves baited with fresh meat and attempted to restart nature's feeding circle of times Nothing much happens to the taxidermist's specimen; as essay the carcass is displayed nearby.

United by means of their various wilderness settings, the three parts also integrate many of the belong tos of Joo's work to date: identity, elemental biology, metaphysics, allusive materials, political critique, life round of yearss and extreme performance. A advantageous example of the latter, Salt Transfer revolution of time (1993-95) first shows a naked Joo attempting to "swim" upon a bed of glistening white pulverized substance revealed to be monosodium glutamate. Then he is seen belly-crawling and hopping about upon the crusty surface of the Great Salt uninhabited (this time, reenacting an evolutionary journey). In the third part a salt-covered Joe sits in a meadow, allowing a 10-point male elk to use him as a human salt lick. Besides the moose-deer and caribou in the videos, there are sum of two units related wall-mounted works, Improved Rack #1 (Moose) 1999 a large elk antler cut in segments and reach forthed with metal rods, and pursue (Balance for Left and Right Lobes), 1993-94 a resin cast of moose-deer antlers filled with toxically reactive chemicals. Joe's shamanistic use of cervine creatures present the appearances a wry homage to Beuys.

individual elaborate installation reconfigures two slightly earlier pieces. god the father II, 2003 (a reworking of the maker 2002), recalls the video's seizure victim with a creepy life-size mannequin wearing a fur-trimmed parka and sprawled atop a frost-cover cube. The face is made of clear plastic, like a medical prototype revealing the skull beneath. Wall body asserts that viewers' breath condensing near the refrigeration unit/pedestal will eventually accumulate to overlay the figure with ice: morbid curiosity, in theory, will thwart itself. Surrounding the plastic art is Unpack, 2002 (similar to Pack, 2002) a number of variously pos life-size coyote protoplasted in resin and urethane.

Like wilderness itself, the piece is puzzling and evocative, compelling and unnerving. While Joe's undergraduate background as a prem major and his polymath pursuits sometimes push his art toward the absurd and arcane, wisdom also lie in waits in his mad-scientist methods. [The exhibition is upon view at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art [i]or[/i] part of to the other June 6.]

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