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3 December 2022 – 14 January 2023Vernissage: Saturday 3 December 6 – 8 PM4 rue des Minimes, 75003 ParisGalerie Marguo is thrilled to present My Heart Says Bang, an exhibition of new and recent work by Los-Angeles based artist Sean Shim-Boyle.
Shim-Boyle’s practice explores the politics of self-identity through rigorous experimentation with material and form. For his first solo exhibition with the gallery and in France, the artist hones in on the invisible biomechanisms to which we are beholden, that not only shape one’s identity but dictate their literal existence. The new and recent works gathered here take as their starting point the abject experience of living with chronic cardiac disease, which first presented in Shim-Boyle’s early twenties.
Artist: Sean Shim-Boyle
Sean Shim-Boyle, 439 BPM, 2022 -
Exhibition Walkthrough with Artist & Mélanie Scheiner
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Exhibition Film Directed by the Artist
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Identity is registered at every scale, from the subatomic, then the atomic, cellular, biological, chemical, physiological, psychological, mechanical, architectural, political, racial, geological... Each scale has a unique vocabulary, organization of knowledge and mechanisms.
— Sean Shim-Boyle
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Sean Shim-Boyle
439 BPM, 2022Silicone
182.9 x 182.9 x 35.6 cm (72 x 72 x 14 in) -
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Sculpture was how I learned how to be alone again, how I learned to stand up and to stay standing, how I learned to feel that electric surge of energy when I'm at the top of a ladder and a sculpture is cracking on me in my hands and it's falling down.
— Sean Shim-Boyle
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Following various surgeries and hospitalisations, building a studio, and a sculptural practice in particular, became a sort of rehabilitation for the artist. The desire to work with materials to find their structural integrity, to figure out how to “make things stand,” deeply meshed with his own need to restore an autonomous sense of self.
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Sean Shim-Boyle
The Harp That Plays Itself, 2016Customized duplex outlet, rubber hose, compressor
Variable dimensions
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs -
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Standing before a suite of massive encaustic paintings into which “LUB DUB” has been etched repeatedly, it is easy to imagine we are facing the inner walls of a freshly ablated heart from a laparoscopic perspective, taking them in as one might do before the drawings at Lascaux.
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The bricolage of ideas, materials, and referents in this exhibition expand the artist’s vocabulary, pulling focus to an architecture of flesh and muscle and electrical impulse. And then further, to the shock and awe, the severance of body and mind peri-cardiac arrest and defibrillation—to a body of work that insists upon an identity borne of imagination, recombination, and resurrection where and when system and strength fail.
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Sean Shim-Boyle
It wasn't in the Plan, 2022Clay, resin, lacquer
106.7 x 106.7 x 40.6 cm (42 x 42 x 16 in) -
Sean Shim-Boyle
Tunnel Vision, 2022The clinical dropped-tile ceiling, cool lights, and walls covered with a pediatric astral motif simulate the pressurized, and psychologically stifling, space of the hospital, echoing Shim-Boyle’s previous forays into architectural space as metaphor for the body or identity.
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Portrait of Sean Shim-Boyle. Courtesy of the artist.
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