Artist Reg Yuson examines the curious form of the jigsaw puzzle in his latest one – man exhibit titled Contained Spaces, featuring wall-mounted and floor steel installations.
The jigsaw puzzle’s seemingly complex yet simplistic geometry and symmetry, and its possible iterations have been fueling Yuson’s interest for sometime now. Notes Yuson “ the history of the jigsaw puzzle goes back to the 1760’s when European mapmakers pasted maps on wood and cut them into pieces. Thus the objective turns out to be an effective playful way to assemble images.”
“In the ‘absence’ of images,” Yuson continues, “the play becomes the play of space, or the assembly of contained spaces found in every jigsaw puzzle piece. Then the emphasis is neither the image nor the space within the work, but of a work within space. It is now sculpture of placement…”
Yuson speaks from experience, bending, forming, and rolling steel sheets for more than a decade, and now feels he has a better grasp on the concept and the material: “The process of cutting sheets made me more curious on the process itself …cutting into things made me realize than rather than cutting “into” the material, the cutting becomes ‘cut in space,’ as directly seen on the wall-mounted jigsaw pieces I made.”
The floor installation, on the other hand, Yuson explains, in subtler in the sense that it does not force itself in the viewer with directness, but at the same time, it is unambiguously present. “Its presence is quiet in its unembellished simplicity defining its space of placement.”
The imageless jigsaw puzzle can be seen as simple uniform, but it has its contrasting elements; cites Yuson, such as “conceptual simplicity vs. perceptual complexity, the labor and the play, singularity multiplicity, directness and allusion, literalness and resonance, and perhaps even blandness and beauty.” It is this multi-faceted yet utter sensibility in showing the uniqueness of perceived common objects that appeals to Yuson aiming to inject different perspectives into the objects. “I intentionally didn’t put images into them,” says Yuson, preferring to concentrate on form and letting the pieces define the work within the spaces where they are placed.
Ultimately, the works are inspired by “the spirit of inquiry; inquiry in relation between art and non-art, between painting and sculpture, and between the object and the space it occupies.”
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