Joongtae Shin: Strata Landscape

"Stacking landscapes — and thereby building the house of being." Strata Landscape carries a double meaning: stacking a landscape, and the notion that anything piled up (and accumulated) becomes a landscape. Stack time, and it becomes a landscape of time; stack history, and it becomes a landscape of history; stack memory, and it becomes a landscape of memory; stack regret, and it becomes a landscape of regret. Life itself, in the end, may be nothing but each of us stacking our own landscape.

Though rooted in the artist's personal experience, the work reaches beyond the individual toward something universal — an attitude toward painting that is also, metaphorically, an attitude toward life. To stack a landscape here is, in a sense, to build a house, much as Heidegger described language as the house of being.

Joongtae Shin, a graduate of Western painting, builds a practice where architectural rhetoric meets painting through the medium of "stacked" landscape. The term "strata," borrowed from architecture, carries both spatiality and temporality — layer upon layer forming a completed thickness and deep texture where scattered past memory meets the sensation of the present, in a structural and constructive abstraction of landscape.