David Zink Yi

Charles H. Scott Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by David Zink Yi. The exhibition will feature a body of work that resulted from a two-month research trip the artist made to the mineral-rich southern Andes in his homeland of Peru. The Strangers (2014), a two-channel video installation records the labouring workers, the mechanics of heavy industry and the striking rock formations in and around the region’s gold and silver mines. Zink Yi pairs the video installation with a series of photographs he took of hastily applied patches on the surface of the road that runs through the mountainous mining region to the coast. In a perpetual loop, the road crew moves from west to east, bottom to top, patching and re-patching. As Miguel López writes, “The markings not only function as odd, abstract images, but also as traces of one of the most active routes of the mining trade, whose repairs allegorize the fragility of an economy burdened by social conflicts only partially and superficial solved.”

David Zink Yi’s multi-faceted art practice comprises sculpture, film and photography. His investigations, often centred on the body, explore concepts of identity and the processes whereby the individual becomes part of the collective through a variety of actions such as music-making, dancing or physical labour. Through displays and installations his work allows for a shift in meaning, reconfiguring contexts and angles to imagine a transformation of the body—which acts as a medium and interpreter of form, not just a bearer of cultural form.

In his film work Horror Vacui, for example, the artist looks at the relationship between Afro-Cuban music and the rituals of the Palo Monte and Yoruba religions. In making his recent video installation The Strangers, Zink Yi spent two months in the southern Andes of his homeland Peru documenting the country’s gold and silver mines. He captures both the workers deep in the mines as well as the harshly compelling terrain in and around the worksites. The photographs that accompany the film depict the scars and markings of this landscape, and Zink Yi’s attention to its forms and textures also speaks of his continuing sculptural practice and his critically acclaimed works such as Architeuthis, a 660-pound depiction of a giant squid.