Sugar Mountain

The Ekru Project is pleased to present Sugar Mountain, a three-person exhibition by Caroline Stran, Sunyoung Park, and Eleanor Foy opening May 13, 2022, and running through July 3, 2022. The artist will be present for the public opening reception on Friday, May 13, from 6 to 9 pm.  Sugar Mountain presents sculptural works by Caroline Stran, Sunyoung Park, and Eleanor Foy. Each artist uses ceramic and other craft processes to imitate other mediums, collectively creating an illusionary, metaphorical space whereupon investigation objects are revealed to be something other than they seem. Caroline Stran creates trompe l’oeil ceramic objects that resemble vintage matchbooks and other paper objects found in her childhood home. They are a mix of recontextualized commercial imagery and original designs, meticulously reproduced on an exaggerated scale. Their precise rendering honors both her own personal narrative and our common experiences, memorializing deteriorating artifacts in a permanent medium. Sunyoung Park translates reality into objects that evoke mysterious atmospheres, defying precise classification. The use of diverse materials allows the pairing of softness with hardness, flexibility with stiffness, lightness with heaviness, and detail with abstraction. These contradictions reference the dualities of masculine and feminine, east and west, and death and life. Her visual translations collaborate with imagination and memory to create puzzles that suggest a multitude of meanings. The practice is a journey to find the essence of an object or experience, and how it relates to the material world. Eleanor Foy creates archetypal forms that are simultaneously familiar and alien, embellished with illuminated plastic pegs originally manufactured to decorate mass-produced ceramic Christmas trees. Disambiguated language is mounted on dimensional ceramic frames. Tabletop lamps reference both degrading architecture and iconic landscape. Layers of material imitating other materials undermine connotations of treasure, preciousness, and objects of value. Together, these works share themes of illusion, translation, memory, nostalgia, and the deconstruction of cultural associations. Sculptural objects born from three different practices exist in the same liminal, daydream-like space: jumbled memory, reality, feeling, and fantasy. The Ekru Project is located at 517 E 18th Street Kansas City, Missouri 64108 We’re open Thursday – Saturday 11 am – 6 pm, and Sunday 11 am – 4 pm For inquiries, email hello@theekruproject.com and follow us on Instagram @theekruproject