Anna Sew Hoy: Invisible Tattoo

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce Anna Sew Hoy: Invisible Tattoo, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2010. The exhibition features recent sculpture that continues to posit relationships between raw materials and found objects, bodies and environments, and temporality and permanence.

An interdisciplinary artist who frequently employs clay and clothing, Sew Hoy’s sculptures persistently explore material transformation in structure, function, and inversion. Reflectivity or makeshift apertures throughout Sew Hoy’s works create opportunities for viewers to catch a glimpse of themselves or others in the act of looking.

Various steel rings in Sight Stand (2015) aim our gaze from specific heights and separate vantage points, generating unexpected sightlines within the exhibition. Scattered Denim Worms resemble familiar mutants, and invoke the body as well as its absence within their discarded skins.

Sew Hoy combines unexpected, often incongruous media — cinderblock and fired stoneware, resin and ear buds, or mirror and fiberglass — to initiate playful questions about the relationship between persons and things. Sculptures placed throughout the gallery invite visitors to become intimately acquainted with their uncanny shapes, sizes, and voids. In this way, the artist insists that we go beyond looking at these objects; instead, we look into and through them, we inhabit them, and we become framed by them.

Invisible Tattoo suggests simultaneous presence and absence — an indelible mark imprinted into flesh that nonetheless remains unseen. On July 27, these connections will be elucidated through a performance and a reading by Dawn Kasper and Laurie Weeks.

Anna Sew Hoy (b. 1976, Auckland; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from Bard College (2008) and a BFA from School of Visual Arts (1998). Sew Hoy is faculty at University of California, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions have been held at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2015); Aspen Art Museum (2015); San Jose Museum of Art (2011); Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., New York (2010); Renwick Gallery, New York (2008); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2008). Selected Group exhibitions have been held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016); and Hammer Museum (2014). Sew Hoy is a recipient of Creative Capital Grant for Visual Artists (2015), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013).