VICE VERSA

Nick Primo + Hae Won Sohn

June 27 - July 27, 2019

Baltimore, MD - MONO Practice Baltimore is delighted to present Vice Versa, a two person exhibition by Nick Primo + Hae Won Sohn. The work examines the perceptions and sense of familiarity surrounding artist modes. Vice Versa relates to how the artists look to given opposing spaces and the impact it has on our ability to formulate constructivism. The aim is to decipher between what's natural and the systems that reinforce structural ideas.

The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance. 
- Sol LeWitt

The exhibition will run through July 27. The gallery hours are Thursdays and Saturdays 1-4pm, and by appointment.

Nick Primo
Utilizing the building processes and visual language of architecture, object, and furniture design, Nick Primo creates sculptures, prints, and drawings that investigate the intersectionality of these constructs with time, transition, intimate and public space. Playful and deliberately ambiguous, but not ambivalent, Primo’s artworks are reflective metaphors on living in a consumer-dominated nation saturated with information and objects, where narrative, truth, and memory are all suspect. Nick Primo (b. New Britain, CT 1982) earned an MFA from Rinehart School of Sculpture at MICA (2014), and a BS in Art Education from Central CT State University (2006). After serving as a public school art educator for half a decade, he relocated to Baltimore, MD to enroll at MICA with the aim of receiving the aforementioned degree. In addition to being an artist and freelance furniture maker, he currently works as an Exhibits Specialist for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His work has been featured in a number of group and solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC.

Hae Won Sohn
Hae Won Sohn’s artistic practice evolves through the process of casting and mold-making; physically, conceptually and methodically. The body of work created primarily consists of a series of cast objects whose origins are substances that are produced in her studio, through her studio practice--either by intention or not. Residues, leftovers, remains, and remnants, which were once valuable parts in the context of one process no longer holds the same meaning, function, nor value once they are removed from its system. She celebrates these autonomous outcasts through the act of casting, an act of acknowledging history as she is preserving moments, and creating new ones. Through repetitional mold-making and casting, SOHN witnesses the distinction between empty volumes and filled volumes, voids and masses, negative spaces and positive ones beginning to neutralize. She invites viewers to join the game of chasing down such visual and structural correlations between the solid moments she has excavated from the system. Hae Won Sohn is a resident artist at Baltimore Clayworks. SOHN earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Design at Kookmin University (Seoul, South Korea), and her Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI). SOHN was the recipient of the Tony Hepburn Scholarship and the Chrissy Award of the year of 2017 at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Zahoorul Akhlaq Gallery (Lahore, Pakistan), Gray Contemporary (Houston, TX), MONO Practice (Baltimore, MD), Sculpture Space NYC (Long Island City, NY), Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), and Kyung-In Museum of Fine Art (Seoul, South Korea).