Paper Work

Jennifer Seo makes paper recreations of objects to better understand what we find important and why. Objects go from being simply a thing we interact with as utility, to a thing that embodies a philosophy and culture. Seo’s current body of work focuses on objects found in old family photographs.

Looking through the photos, Seo picks out common objects that family members in the scene would have interacted with most. Her making process is intentionally repetitive and careful. This meticulous labor elevates the handmade objects through the time and care spent producing them. While making these objects, Seo considers the lost moments, making space for quiet reflection.

Through the act of creating these objects, she reconstructs lost artifacts. It is a study of her family she always felt disconnected from, but that she cherishes. Through making these everyday objects, Seo hopes to celebrate the minutia and monotony taken for granted. As Seo makes the work, she projects herself into experiences she was not always present for. She gleans information from what is visible in the photographs to augment her limited knowledge of her family members and her theories of their past time. Speculating about the rituals of daily life by recreating lost objects recorded around her family is an exercise for locating her Korean-American perspective.

The sculptures are made through a process of templating and patterning. The limiting characteristics of paper emphasize the replicated nature of the realized object, and Seo is interested in this preservation that deconstructs the original. She is also interested in the immediacy of the drawing process as a concept that she transitions into a sculptural process. The process folds in comparisons of illusion versus actual, and observation versus perception.

Seo finds the accessibility and fragility of paper very poetic. The ghostly visual of the sculptures produces a sense of preservation and loss. These processes and material choices become a metaphor for the gaps she perceives in trying to translate an embodied Koreanness of a second generation immigrant experience.

The sculptures are of objects that are identifiably hand-activated. Seo wants the viewer to recognize that action and insert themselves into an imagined scene with the work, participating in her attempt to connect. These works are not about the objects, but rather the time of the objects.

Jennifer Seo was born in Florida and grew up in Los Angeles. She is currently teaching at Gonzaga University. Seo received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from University of Texas San Antonio in 2020. While in Los Angeles, she studied at artist, So Moon Kim’s Hagwon from 2004 to 2005. She received her BFA from Baylor University in 2014, and worked for Karl Umlauf from 2013-2017. She was an artist in residence at Stove Works summer of 2023.

Seo’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her recent solo exhibitions include shows at Delta State University’s Fielding Wright Art Center Gallery in Cleveland, MS; Smith College’s Oresman Gallery in Northampton, MA; Penn State’s Sheetz Gallery in Altoona, PA; and the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art (CICA) Museum in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.