Diana Noh
Diana Noh is a photographic installation artist who has exhibited throughout the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include features at Coker University’s Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery in Hartsville, South Carolina, Space HNH in Seoul, Talking Dolls in Detroit, and 934 Gallery, in Columbus, Ohio. Notable collective exhibitions include the Griffin Museum in Winchester, Massachusetts, The Fulton Street Collective, Woman Made Gallery, Union Street Gallery, and Purple Window Gallery in Chicago. Diana has performed over half a dozen lectures and artist talks to date at universities such as Chicago Center for Arts and Technology and Wayne State University, in Detroit.
The installations are photographs molded and shaped into three-dimensional relief sculptures created by cutting, stitching, puzzling, burning, crumbling, and tearing. Some of the works contain fiber elements, as they are pieced together through threading. Diana’s photographs depict dilapidated interiors and architecture, often overgrown with mold, foliage, or left-over debris. These revealing settings convey a narrative about destructive elements of abandonment and neglect, emphasized through the power of erosion and material decay. Although, some pieces reflect delicate landscapes being molded by the form of sculpturally-altered photography, creating a shifting and disillusioned aesthetic.
Building upon the theme of abandonment and neglect, these environments communicate the fragility of structures when not carefully tended to by occupants. One might find surprise in how much damage the natural elements can do to a building when neglected or unoccupied for only a handful of decades. The destructive attributes of nature chipping away at human-created structures reveals a loss of civilization amongst contemporary and modern ruins. Diana attempts to jury-rig or hastily repair these destroyed structures and interiors, not literally, but figuratively through depictions in art. She disassembles the buildings to realistically convey their destroyed status and reconstructs the images to communicate a sense of rejuvenation and replenishment. These conceptual works touch upon the notion of how art can be used to express deep emotional impulses through metaphorical processes, rather than literal depictions.
Duplex-Feed, mirrored (pictured above) conveys a natural aesthetic and expresses the dichotomy between organic and artificial elements. Here we witness a human-created structure become devoured and destroyed by vines and foliage, as if nature were speeding up the corrosion of the interior while at the same time offering a pleasant aesthetic. The piece communicates how nature should be feared yet respected and admired simultaneously.
Diana Noh expresses clever use of collage, fiber, and sculptural techniques by disassembling and reassembling her own photography in playful junctions with notions of limitations. Finite confrontations of abandoned creations, represented in the forms of interiors, interact with the elements of nature. Diana’s sense of restorative qualities as an artist represents a deep inclination to repair not only our surroundings, but metaphorically with our relationships with others. In a world heavily divided amongst every ideological line, further enhanced by the confrontational enablement of digital media, her work offers reprieve for those looking to build rather than destroy.
