Rachel Youn
Residency
Rachel Youn is a visual artist working with kinetic sculpture and installation. Interested in the exhaustive gestures of contemporary life, they combine secondhand wellness devices, such as massagers, baby rockers and exercise machines, with artificial plants to create kinetic works of perpetual motion. Through altering objects designed for physical instant gratification, the works evoke bodies that experience their own form of eroticism, humor and torture, moving ceaselessly towards their own death and obsolescence.
At Scuola Piccola Zattere, Youn will develop an installation informed by research of religious imagery, spaces and ritual. Interested in the indistinction of pain and ecstasy and informed by their own religious upbringing, Youn’s research will explore rituals of mortification, baptism, and roleplay.
Rachel Youn (b. 1994) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; G Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; and Soy Capitán, Berlin, Germany, among others. Youn has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; FuoriCamp, Siena, Italy; Kunsthalle Barmen, Wuppertal, Germany; DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic; Alice Amati, London, UK; PODIUM, Hong Kong, China; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; SHRINE, New York, NY; Gallery Belenius, Stockholm, Sweden; and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, among others. Youn is a recipient of the Lighthouse Works Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial Award. They received their BFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO. Youn holds an MFA from Yale School of Art in New Haven. Youn’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artsy, ARTnews, Vogue, LA Review of Books, Artillery Magazine, Elephant, amongst others.