WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA.- CMay Gallery is presenting Sight Lines, a solo exhibition featuring the mind bending sculptures of Yi Hwan Kwon. In addition to the concurrent public installation "Bus Stop" at West Hollywood Park, the exhibition features 16 artworks by the artist, including new works.

Yi Hwan-kwon’s eccentric and arresting sculptures and environmental installations are both the sites and the triggers for an explosion of cognitive and visceral dissonance. Cheerfully brimming with paradox, his distorted statuary of modern people have the immediacy and surprise energy of Pop Art, but none of its flashy, high-calorie excesses. Instead, these object-images offer nuanced disorientation; they are as much about direct experiential materiality as they are about deracinated, mediated perceptions. They offer poetic personal narrative and socio-political analysis. They speak simultaneously in the languages of art history and science fiction. Like Helen of Troy, each of his faces launch 1,000 ships of inquiry.

Encountering his stretched, attenuated, truncated, squashed, yet otherwise realistic sculptures, often in unexpected public settings like parks and plazas, viewers frequently report feelings of “dizziness” and “giddiness” at being confronted with what are essentially beings from another plane of existence appearing as anomalies in our world. It’s like a curtain lifted on a parallel universe. It’s like straddling both sides of the looking glass. It’s a powerful metaphor for the divided state of the world we do inhabit, and for the joyfully transformative power of art.