Julie Oh

My first encounter with Julie Oh’s work was a webpage printout taped to the door of my photography professor’s office. The article discussed Canada Council for the Art’s decision to secure a photographic work by Oh for their collection, the only Saskatchewan artist from the 2009 round of acquisitions. The image on the press release, titled Paper Route (2009), features a woman dragging a wagon on a sidewalk. The work is from a series of seven photographs that focus on Oh’s experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in Canada. The work resonated a level of personal intimacy that was immediately gripping, and I was intrigued to discover an emerging local artist being recognized on a national level.

Now, several years later, my perception and understanding of Oh’s practice has completely evolved. A close friend recently showed me unedited footage of a video he shot of a recent performance by Oh. Along with several Remai Modern staff members, Oh carried two long wooden dowels across Senator Sid Buckwold Bridge in Saskatoon onto the second floor of Remai Modern. This performance documentation was included in lines, a project by Oh for Remai Modern’s annual RBC Emerging Artist exhibition series. This project used common and easily available objects purchased from Home Depot, and recontextualized them by bringing the mass-produced building materials into the gallery space. The disparate dimensions of the dowels were used to draw lines from the floor to ceiling of both the museum floor and one of the building’s public elevators.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of visiting Oh in her studio in the Saskatoon Makerspace. The space was full of artworks and within it, a sequestered portion dedicated to displaying works in progress. One of these works presented is a series of pill bottles aligned in the fashion of a chessboard. These bottles all belonged to her mother and were acquired after visits to her family home. In May of this year, with an exhibition deadline on the horizon, Oh set a physical and conceptual parameter of working with objects only found in her mother’s home.

While speaking with Oh she mentioned that this current body of work is a “sharp left turn from previous work, where I was finding objects out in the world, and then working with what I found.”(1) Working with objects found in a singular location or origin is a less passive approach than allowing for an object in the wild to present itself to her. This criteria feels like a form of research and discovery, as Oh is unsure of how this method will lead this body of work. Oh described this new source of material as a “familial Home Depot,”(2) and based on her practice as a whole, this description feels appropriate.

Using a controlled setting as a conceptual tool allows Oh to work without the pressure of finding the right object, but nonetheless, Oh stressed the painfully slow nature of this process. She would bring a work into the studio hoping to actualize an idea, often working quickly with the intention to move onto the next work, but now has to wait until the appropriate moment to revisit the source, her mother’s home. Oh considers this location to be an “archive of how she came to be,”(3) building a greater understanding of how this project is suitably recognizing and honouring her mother and her personal history. Oh was trying to “find a way to have multiple object interventions, where they all are within one boundary,”(4) while in the process creating a transition away from using industrial or commercial sources and onto one that is immensely more personal and direct. The objects explore who Oh’s mother is as a person, what her environment is like, and the time in which these objects were accumulated.

When Oh brings an object into the studio, its meaning and function is suddenly changed. Now in a gallery or work space, void of medication or the hope of wellness, the pill bottles have a new function within their place on the chessboard. The blue bottles must battle the orange bottles, acting as “a battle against self”(5), referring to the medication treating the body as a game. Oh’s relationship with these deeply personal objects reflects her interest in the anatomical abstractions of the body. She wants to explore how the shape, design, and function of these found objects reference and relate to the body. During our conversation, Oh reflects on the board game Operation and how the boardgame’s design and pieces have changed over its manufacturing history and the utilization of Scotch tape in the home. Oh is instinctually responding to her mother’s home, with many of these objects being fundamental to how her mother functions, communicates, and maintains her daily life. Oh’s particular interest in Scotch tape, and its prevalence in the home is showcased in a constructed makeshift voice box, replicating her mother’s own real-life voice box. Oh’s mother and the objects that reside in her home have become intertwined entities. Oh views these objects as “a gift given onto”(6) her, allowing her to honour her mother and their shared history.

Oh’s upcoming solo exhibition “Tunnel, Air, Mother” will transform the gallery into an observation room. The space will have a one-directional view of the exhibition from the outside of it, allowing for viewers to see into the space, but not outside of it. Oh wants to create a voyeur experience, replicating her mother observing her as a child, and in turn Oh observing her mother and her life. Oh considers every work included to be a body of work in its own right, and that the entirety of the pieces are not necessarily considered as a series, everything is contained within its own idea, singular pieces can be viewed and considered on its own as if they are their own being.

Once the exhibition is over, all of the objects which Oh gathered from her mother will go back to her house. Fulfilling their purpose and again changing their context. “Tunnel, Air, Mother” by Julie Oh is curated by Jennifer Matotek and opens on November 20th at the Sherwood Gallery, hosted by the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina Saskatchewan, and the show will run until January 26th, 2020.

1. Oh, Julie. Interview with Kyle Zurevinski. Audio recording. Saskatoon, SK, August 29, 2019.
2. Oh, interview with Kyle Zurevinski, 2019.
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