Michael Joo with Amanda Gluibizzi

Artist Michael Joo will discuss their work and process with ArtSeen Editor, Amanda Gluibizzi. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Sharon Mesmer.

Michael Joo is a Korean-American artist best known for his scientific approach. Joo employs a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, photography, and printmaking, to reflect on identity, cultural heritage, and natural history. Joo’s non-linear, almost cyclical approach to his practice, together with his combination of scientific language and research, results in work that is a documentation of process. Whether chemically treated, silver-coated or photo-based, Joo’s artwork combines a range of techniques associated with sculp-ture, painting, photography and printmaking. He continues to blur the boundaries between art and science through his investigation into ontology, epistemology and entropy; creating a cross-disciplinary and multi-dimensional dialogue to engage, question, meditate and explore. By juxtaposing humanity’s various pools of knowledge and culture, Joo addresses the fluid nature of identity itself. It seems as if the artist’s intention is to achieve the unachievable: to make us see an object in real life that is barely conceivable as thought alone.He received his BFA from Washington University, St Louis, in 1989 and his MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, 1991.

Amanda Gluibizzi is an ArtSeen editor at The Brooklyn Rail. An art historian, she is the co-director of The New Foundation for Art History and the author of Art and Design in 1960s New York (forthcoming).

Sharon Mesmer is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and teacher. Her most recent poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books, 2015), was voted “Best of 2015” by Entropy magazine. Other collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Half Angel/Half Lunch and Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). She has also published three fiction collections, including Ma Vie à Yonago, from Hachette, in French translation. Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. Her awards include a Fulbright Specialist grant, a Jerome Foundation mentoring award and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships.

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.