May 20 – June 24, 2023

“The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden”

 Donna Haraway. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991)

Meeson Jessica Pae’s solo exhibition with Rusha & Co., Fluid Machines, is the artist’s debut exhibition of painting. In pinks, blacks, shades of grays and veins of blues, Pae’s canvases are the works of a scientific designer of the interior. Abstracted forms bubble out the fluidal concert of inflows and outflows within the body’s inners/innards. Faceless, the works delve deep beyond the exterior of the body and into the cavities within, where new pathways to figuration emerge from a perspective on corporeality that is as informed by the understandings of anatomy from science-present (inherently and unobtrusively technological) to science-past (dissection).

Pae embraces the body of our times as that of the cyborg, rejecting rigid boundaries, including those which separate “human” from “animal” as well as “human” from “machine.” Abandoning stratification, the works exist within planes of formal consistency, allowing new relationships between biological understandings of the interior to emerge. Involved in a type of technoscientific world-building, Pae’s fusion of machine and organism reflects the modern synthesis between organic and synthetic remedies to bodily pathosis. Organs made of inanimate polymers, reconstituted living cells, and bioartificial parts are integrated into the the bodies of the ailed through surgeries invasive and non. In early “medicine”, the anatomical studies of Aristotle were a path for the philosopher’s search to understand the relationship between the soul and flesh. While contemporary formal sciences may have left that confluence behind, Pae’s phenomenology finds meaning, truth, and a breadth of emotional understandings hidden within her imaginings of a surreal human interior.

There is a rhythm of sensuality in these undulating, pulsating forms within Pae’s paintings. Juices and liquids must be the substances squirted and transposed by the tubes flowing from one work to another – are these emissions held within not just the flowing of love? Discoveries of the yonic and phallic whispers within Pae’s paintings are as crucial in understanding the works as they are in the dance of life itself. Indeed, the creation from within the navel is triggered by other organs of flesh—living things creating living things—the eternal magic of the universe, obscured and disregarded by modern gynecologies that fundamentally ignore the fantastical miracles of life on planet Earth. Pae shines a light on the organic intimacies contained and transferred within the body with an approach that rejects the clinical, and embraces the erotic.

Fluid Machines is an exhibition about desires of the body, desire within the body, and bodily desire in and of itself. If only our insides looked like this. If only Meeson Jessica Pae could rearrange our guts.

Meeson Jessica Pae is a multi-disciplinary artist from Indianapolis, Indiana whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and digital artwork. She  received a BFA from University of California, Los Angeles and her MFA from California State University, Long Beach. Recent exhibitions include Horizons, Sow and Tailor, Hong Kong (2023); Converge (00), MONO, Tunis (2022; solo); The Last Notice Show, Rusha & Co., Los Angeles (2022); Beautiful, Not Pretty, Wonzimer, Los Angeles (2022); and Transmute, The LOFT, San Pedro (2018, solo). Pae’s work has also been featured at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, the Torrance Art Museum, the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles, and Harvard University’s Carpenter Center in Cambridge.

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