“Yeon Jin Kim: Spaceship Grocery Store” would seem, at first, to be more a product of technology than craft. It’s a video (you can call it up on YouTube), created by a Korean artist (born in Seoul in 1978), who got her master’s from Hunter College and did a fellowship at Yaddo in 2009.
The video follows an alien — it looks like two boomboxes and a VCR on legs — as it walks through an urban street, stopping by a store, passing through a bombed-out neighborhood and finally boarding a bus. The alien, the backgrounds and various 3-D props are drawn on paper or cardboard with a pencil, but the backdrop is actually a long scroll that the figures, pinned on Mylar fishing line, move past as the artist pulls them along.
That’s interesting, but hardly new — the “South Park” pilot created a remarkable illusionism with just bits of construction paper, so minimalist animation is pretty mainstream these days. But what is new is that Kim shoots her entire eight-minute movie in one take. Any glitch, like a figure getting hung up on a knot in the fishing line, means starting over. It’s as if every Kim movie is one of those long tracking shots John Frankenheimer made for “The Train,” which a film critic once described as “several minutes of action looking for a mistake.”
Kim has set up her apparatus — the little house models, the bus, the characters and other 3-D elements — in the small second-floor gallery where the video is displayed. The long scroll that forms the backdrop is there, too. No more than knee-high, the scroll is arranged around the walls of the room like a Chinese ink painting, which Kim says was her inspiration.
“Spaceship Grocery Store” is animation, but it’s also a hand-drawn landscape and cut-out figures — does that make them sculpture? — that take part in a sustained performance. The simplicity and childlike obviousness of Kim’s devices is evidently intended to remind us of her low-tech ingenuity. This is not “Wallace and Gromit” on a shoestring (or on a fish string), but a kind of parody of professionally rendered, smoothly coordinated animation. Most of which, as we all know, is made in Korean sweatshops these days.
In contrast, “Kirsten Hassenfeld: Cabin Fever” is immediately identifiable as handcraft: Hassenfeld deliberately refers to the pioneer crafts of quilting and making hook rugs with her work, which is assembled from scraps collected from of her daily life, such as straws, bottle caps, bills and envelopes, all of it filled out with reams of vintage wrapping paper. She finds the pre-“Mad Men” era wrapping paper on eBay; it is printed in pale greens and oranges, with cartoony little bunnies, deer, snowflakes and kittens.
Hassenfeld has split the first-floor gallery at Hunterdon into two spaces, with a wall of backlit wrapping paper punctured by a door in the middle. What you first see is a sort of polygonal chandelier shaped by plastic tubes and papered over with all sorts of commonplace ephemera. When you pass through the door, the walls are lined with flat collages made of tightly folded printed papers, receipts, etc; that she makes into bars and assembles into patterns that are at least a bit reminiscent of those on the old wrapping paper.
There’s a lace doily, almost 19th-century-wedding-cake feel to a lot of Hassenfeld, like there is to Kara Walker’s silhouettes. Her meticulously crafted chandeliers take on a stacked-volume shape that echoes Victorian lathe-turned furniture, and she’s fond of keepsake-like framing devices and hints of traditional embroidery, scrollwork decoration and cameos. Hunterdon has done many shows that speak to handcraft’s descent from the “women’s work” of a century ago, and this show fits into the series neatly.
Many female artists have seized on making art out of the detritus of daily life, in a puckish poke at consumerism and cheerful banality, but “Cabin Fever” seems more formal than that, as if it were more concerned with styles than it is with materials. Hassenfeld graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Arizona, and she’s been shown at a number of prestigious venues lately, but this is her first solo show in a museum.
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