CHRISTINE KO
’MODEL HOME’
24 MAY – 30 JUNE, 2018
Christine Ko, Model Home, motorised vertical blinds with mirror tint film and frosted film, dimensions variable, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Christine Ko works with large scale installation and photomedia to explore marginality and spaces characterised by the ‘in-between’. Ko’s practice uses an autoethnographic methodology to explore the liminal experience of the modern Chinese-Australian immigrant and conflicting multi-cultural identities. By interrogating spaces of liminality and hybridity, Ko explores feelings of ambivalence—between hopes, dreams, invisibility and guilt, which can result from experiencing cultural displacement as an immigrant, to create installations that often use immersion to engage with the audience.
Christine Ko, “Model Home”, motorised vertical blinds with mirror tint film and frosted film, dimensions variable, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
‘Model Home’ continues Ko’s research into the duality and liminality of the migrant experience, self-identity and the transitory and uncertain nature of the modern human condition. The work builds upon ideas Ko has visually referenced in previous works of home and the icon of the house as a metaphor for the self and windows as a liminal zone between the outer (surface) and hidden inner worlds.
Christine Ko, “Model Home”, motorised vertical blinds with mirror tint film and frosted film, dimensions variable, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
At the core of the installation is a house shaped from a number of strategically hung vertical blinds that are motorised so they are constantly opening and closing. The blinds are made of mirror tint film whose dual transparent and reflective properties creates multiple layers and fractured reflections that warp the viewers’ sense of depth and perception of self and are used to explore the experience of ‘in-between-ness’—a dream-like state one encounters when they are in a space of being neither here nor there.
Christine Ko, “Model Home”, motorised vertical blinds with mirror tint film and frosted film, dimensions variable, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.