Various Small Fires is pleased to present Skunk Cabbage, an exhibition of paintings by American artist Jessie Homer French in Seoul, Korea. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in Asia and third with VSF.
For over a decade, the artist has lived in the desert mountains several hours outside of Los Angeles — it is this landscape, along with the surrounding Western United States, that the artist consistently returns to in her practice. For the artist’s debut in South Korea, VSF has selected a group of works from the artist’s studio based on French’s personal narratives around water and wildfires — two central themes that have transfixed Homer French for decades — alongside the artist’s self-named “mapestries,” the latter of which are shown here for the first time with VSF.
The artist is an avid fly-fisher with an intimate familiarity with local bodies of water, a personal relationship visualized and honored via her painstaking renderings of her favored fishing locales, as seen in Big Brown in Grant Lake. Meanwhile, Homer French’s personal writing on her work reveals an intimate knowledge of fish: Brookie Hole in Gull Lake, for instance, documents Brook Trout — “brookies,” as Homer French affectionately calls them. According to the artist, although the shallow Gull Lake heats up in the summer, “Brook Trout prefer cold water — an icy spring comes up in the bottom of the lake and the brookies hang out there.” Meanwhile, Blowout documents an oil rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico, with Red Drums, Weakfish, and Tarpons swimming furiously, albeit futilely, away from the source of danger. For the artist, fish are not abstract symbols but central characters. In highlighting the oil rig fire’s immediate impact on three particular species indigenous to the contaminated gulf, Homer French issues an urgent call for climate justice as aquatic life suffers in the face of human negligence.
