Seonna Hong: Freytag's Pyramid
My work has always been about relational dynamics: friend to friend, love to love, mother to child...but in recent years it's grown from the microcosm of my little world to include the relational dynamics of individual to community, community to the world at large, and the world at large to the environment.
In the exhibition Freytag’s Pyramid artist Seonna Hong uses the framework of novelist Gustav Freytag’s dramatic structure to visually chronicle the ebb and flow of life, memory, and human experience. The structural elements of storytelling as laid out by Freytag are broken up into a five-part pyramid: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and finally, Denouement. Hong’s paintings visually evoke the tension and drama of storytelling. Her figures, typically women, drive the narrative across landscapes varying from rocky and rugged, to hazily rendered liquidlike dreamscapes. Each canvas reveals moments of chaos and calm, reality and fiction, and illustration and abstraction. Hong’s work successfully balances controlled graphics with intuitive, loose application of paint, revealing the grandness of the shared human experience.
