Beer bottle caps, a.k.a. crowns, seem to be a favorite material for artists to use. Here’s yet another very cool use of crowns to make something spectacular looking. The artist, Eung Ho Park, has painted the inside of the crowns in pairs to resemble staring eyes and creates entire walls of them to great effect, as if a crowd of people were looking back at you from the wall of the museum. The piece is called, appropriately, I’m Looking At You and was completed in 2008.
Click on the image above for a larger, more detailed view.
A different version of the same piece was exhibited at the Queens International 2004, when another art blog, Edward Winkelman, chose Park as his Artist of the Week.
Here’s a detail of I’m Looking At You.
And this what it looks like on a wall, from an angle.
Here’s his biography from his website:
Eung Ho Park was born in Woonchun, South Korea and he received his BFA from Pratt Institute. Eung Ho Park has exhibited at Exit Art, the Drawing Center in New York City, Sculpture Center, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the Long Island University, DM Contemporary, Maxwell Davidson Gallery, Sabina Lee Gallery in Los Angeles, and Wake Forest University in South Carolina. Park has created a permanent sculpture for PS 270 in Queens, New York. His work had been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, Art on Paper, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He lives in Jackson Heights Queens and maintains a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
And here’s an even closer close-up, giving a good idea of the amount of detail Park put into painting each set of eyes.
And here’s his statement about his work in general:
As a Korean transplant to New York, I ponder the notion of identity and continuously question racial and ethnic divide. My work evolves through a gradual thought process beginning with the selection of ordinary objects used in routine daily consumption. These manufactured goods, like items in a time capsule, represent and preserve ideas of culture. Based upon my observations of social relationships and my personal experiences as an immigrant, I transform groupings of these mundane objects, whether spoons, bottle caps or bowling balls, into installations that depict contemporary narratives of humanity.
There’s not much else about Park out there, though there’s another post about this work at Y Gallery New York and DM Contemporary, plus a cool video by Ray Rapp for Kuf-Mold Exhibition, showing a number of Eung Ho Park’s works.