Veronica

Doris Guo
Shanghai San Francisco Richmond Seattle New York Oslo (TRACE)

December 10, 2022 - January 28, 2023

My parents’ home houses all their artworks created in the 70’s-90’s that they brought back from Shanghai to Bellevue, WA. Mostly untouched for decades, my mother has started to make various small repairs for her canvases, begun re-stretching them, mounting works on paper, and lightly packing them. Together, we started a project of photographing these works and of caring for them materially. Although an archive might be what is produced at the end of this project, this is predominantly a project of care. 

It hasn’t been easy to do this work. I have been living too far away from them, visiting only once a year. For 11 years I lived in New York up until last year, when I moved further away to Oslo. The show title is a combined list of all the places my parents and I have lived for substantial amounts of time. Time difference has been a part of our relationship for over a decade. Between Seattle and Oslo are 9 time zones. With a 9 hour difference, there’s always a bit of projection necessary. On our calls I project how she might feel having a full day ahead. She projects that I am likely tired, but also forgets sometimes. While we are on the phone together I am momentarily not in a singular time zone. Due to my cycles of physical proximity to them, multiple time zones are a regular part of my life. Modes of catching up and reorientations are perennial.
 
Visible in the gallery are two sections of brick column. These columns continue out as the facade of the building, exposed to the street and various weather conditions. These blocks are wearing down at different rates, existing in differently-paced time zones. I have doubled the light fixtures that are outside on the brick into the gallery space, and shifted over in a state of reorientation.

For the moment, the gallery houses pairings of my mother’s work with prints of pinhole photographs of my parents' studio at home. In thinking about the peripheries of domestic space, it is easy for me to imagine their house. Especially there, I think about living with artwork. I think about a bowl in the corner, dusted surface tops, paper invoices and dim lighting. Living with artwork can mean after a while you might not even notice it. It becomes casual. It’s our passing thoughts, our emotions, the social ambience which subsumes the objects in the room. These objects do not live without us. 

– Doris Guo

Doris Guo (b. 1992, USA) is currently working and living in Oslo. She received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2014 and is currently an MFA candidate at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo for 2023.  Solo exhibitions include inge, New York (2022),  9PM Til I at Éclair, Berlin (2019), XO at Bodega, New York (2019), Coffee & Tea at Princess, New York (2018) and Joss at Real Fine Arts, New York (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Ten Year Anniversary Show, VI, VII, Oslo (2022), When the Word Becomes Flesh, Baader-Meinhof, Omaha (2022), Post Box Group, Copenhagen (2022), Welding in Space, LEMME, Scion (2021), Remnant, Artifact, Flow, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2021), Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), Plymouth Rock, Zurich (2020), 01102020, Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn (2020), Cruise Kidman Kubrick, Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich, (2019), Pastoral (Grind and Drone), 47 Canal, New York (2019), The Parisian Nights, Crèvecoeur, Paris (2019).