In Christian theology, it connoted untethered passions, sin, anger, sexual passion, and the devil. It’s a carnal, somatic hue so synonymous with the life within us, though, that to see it as evil seems like a misunderstanding. This dichotomy is mirrored in Coniunctio—an alchemic term for the merging of two opposites—the title of Kyung-Me and Harry Gould Harvey’s two-person exhibition at Bureau, New York. The show features meticulous pen drawings by Kyung-Me, their intricacies executed over the course of hundreds of hours. Expansive interiors test the confines of the picture plane, featuring familiar furnishings that reference architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s obsessive design practice. This metaphorical pilgrimage across space and time is mirrored in Harvey’s slow-burning wax works—eloquent spires and ambiguous figures rendered with painstaking precision. Harvey’s illustrations also adorn the walls, their sacred geometries seemingly a metaphysical map of the viewing experience itself. The wax, red and dripping, seems almost a gothic ode to the passionate idiom of blood, sweat, and tears. We toil, we tire, and we evolve. Challenging the notion of secularity, Coniunctio invites us to speculate on the human desire for spiritual wholeness, outside of what we already thought we knew.
