A Feeling of A Feeling

Gillian Toliver, Jackson Kile, and mihyun maria kim

Curated by Avalon Mott

September 6 - October 6, 2024

A feeling is effervescent. Born in our brains, it bubbles, fizzes and spreads through the body then fades. It is joy and sorrow and love and despair. A feeling of a feeling is elusive. It’s a faint echo of the original emotion, filtered through layers of memory and time. Inherited through generations of gestures, it surfaces unexpectedly—sometimes triggered by something as intimate as a strand of hair, and sometimes by something as inert as a forgotten photo album on a shelf. Over time, emotions can fragment, leaving us with only partial impressions of what we once felt. Just as a translation can fail to capture the nuance of a text’s original meaning, a feeling of a feeling is a subtler and more opaque version of the original thing.

A Feeling of A Feeling is a site-specific, multi-installation group exhibition of works by Gillian Toliver, Jackson Kile, and mihyun maria kim which examines the intangible affects bestowed upon us by identity. Through themes of fragmentation, translation and translucency, the artists use gestural responses to confront the limitations of language as a means of expression.

On the gallery walls, stretching into the corners and wrapping around them, gestural graphite marks make up Gillian Toliver’s continuous line mural. The rhythmic character of Toliver’s lines emerges from the artist’s relationship with her hair, and her desire to create spaces where her Scottish-Caribbean identity feels at peace—an ease often found in the repetitive movements of mundane domestic tasks, such as washing floors or doing dishes. As the mural flows through the gallery, it intersects with works by Klie and kim, ensuring that each piece is experienced in relation to the others—a testament to the interconnectedness of our identities.

Towards the back of the space, Toliver’s series Paper Skin Makes Me Waver in the Breeze intersects a half wall, teasing the viewer to investigate further. In front of the wall one large scale graphite drawing is suspended by a single hand-carved wooden pole, levitating. Inside the secluded nook, four additional drawings drape over Toliver’s wood poles and hang at various heights from the ceiling. Illuminating the ever-shifting nature of feeling, the deep permanence of the lines in these drawings are in stark juxtaposition to the delicateness of the mural.

On the south wall, Jackson Klie’s series Altogether Unnatural is displayed in two horizontal lines, echoing the grid pattern of the vintage graph paper with which the works are affixed. In this series Klie examines taxonomies—particularly scientific photographs of tree flowers—with the intent of blurring the boundaries between fact and perception. By collaging archival imagery with AI-generated visuals, Altogether Unnatural creates an uncanny contrast between the traditional associations of flowers with the unsettling quality of photographic abstraction. As a queer man, Klie challenges the conventional role of archives, using them not as sources of absolute truth but as tools for questioning and reinterpreting identity and experience.

Across from Klie’s series, a series of carbon transfers and oil paintings by mihyun maria kim reflect the artist’s desire to draw connections between her (un)known family history, research and present-day self. A recurring theme in kim’s interdisciplinary practice is exploring untranslatable affects, such as the Korean concept of han—a profound emotional state marked by deep sorrow and longing entangled in unresolved historical grief. Hung in rows like delicate items of clothing drying in a warm summer breeze, her carbon transfers draw the viewer towards them with an invitation for close engagement. From a distance, the passages appear illegible, but up close, they reveal untranslated texts significant to kim's exploration of how han manifests in her life.  Behind the carbon transfers are paintings from kim’s ongoing series between memory and (be)longing. These paintings capture the atmosphere of the places kim inhabited during their creation, documenting her desire for belonging and a sense of place in unfamiliar environments.

A Feeling of A Feeling is a shimmer of what once was, an afterimage of an experience that lingers at the edge of our awareness. This exhibition invites us to explore these delicate echoes, offering glimpses into the traces that shape our sense of self and identity.