Sculptor Rachel Hayes and painter Jiha Moon have been collaborating since 2007 when they met at Art Omi International Artists Residency.
Kansas City artist Rachel Hayes’s main interest is in constructing and altering space with layered colors, texture from various fabric and synthetic vinyl by sewing them together. Hayes often builds the large composed sewn panels as an installation that can be viewed in both indoor and outdoor environments. Viewers can experience color, space, material, light and shadow in a transformed setting.
Jiha Moon is an Atlanta-based painter whose gestural paintings explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. Moon is taking cues from everyday life, mixing and twisting to make new iconographies that are in between familiar and unfamiliar zones. Moon’s bold, layered and detailed landscapes on Korean mulberry paper appear light hearted and spontaneous.
There are many dualities within the collaboration of Moon and Hayes. There is balance found in the graphic structures, sewn grids, gestural mark-making and fluid forms. Hayes and Moon together combine and embrace their opposite elements in their collaborative installations. Moon’s bold and delicate brushstrokes are painted and embedded within Rachel's sculptural panels sewn out of fabrics and Korean mulberry paper.
They go back and forth with each other’s work to make alterations and suggest possible images. There is much negotiation and deconstruction of the fabric paintings in their separate studios in Kansas City and Atlanta. The second part of collaboration is at the actual site, as they build and install these panels in the new space. Their first collaborated effort, “Outflow” was seen at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta Georgia (December 2008 – January 2009) as part of a group exhibition, “More Mergers & Acquisitions” curated by Stuart Horodner.
Outflow – Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009), Atlanta, GA
Hayes and Moon have been awarded their second exhibition opportunity at The Lab Gallery in New York. The work entitled “Chutes and Tears” is a landscape which will unfold and reveal itself as one walks past the windows of the Lab Gallery in April 2011. They are working on adding the new element of used denim blue jeans to this installation, to create and evoke waterfalls in the space. They are in the middle of collecting and shredding many shades and different hues of used jeans which will connect to the painting’s fabric panel. They want to bring unexpected, surprising material to their collaborative work.
