February 13 – April 18, 1999
On view was one of Germaine Koh’s recent works, a single channel video installation. A small monitor sat in the corner of the front gallery and depicted an image of an abstracted space that resembles an aerial view of an alien terrain. Further examination of the image reveals the camera’s arduous, up-close survey of the perimeter of a carpeted room, a compulsive claim of a marginalized domestic space to which we are usually oblivious.
Like Living Room, much of Koh’s work uses the understated and ordinary. In Koh’s ongoing Knitwork, she re-knits into a single item garments found or purchased at thrift stores. This laborious piece was started in 1992, and as of the summer of 1998 is 180 feet long and is comprised of over 260 garments. Knitwork, like Living Room, uses materials of domestic comfort to overwhelm and excess.
Germaine Koh was born in Malaysia and resides in Ottawa, Canada. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Ottawa in 1989, and she received her Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She has had many group and solo exhibitions at such galleries as Centre des Artes Actuels SKOL in Montreal, London Regional Art and Historical Museums in London, and the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle. She represented Canada in “Every Day,” the 11th Biennale of Sydney last year. Koh is a prolific and active artist who has had exhibitions at Teresa Arte Alternativo in Mexico City and the Ottawa Art Gallery, and she was an artist in residence in the Canada Council for the Arts Studio in Paris in the summer of 1999. A writer and critic, Koh’s work has appeared in Flash Art and C Magazine.
