Joan Oh
Joan Oh creates video works that fuse rehearsal and performance, staging and reality.
Joan Oh creates video works that fuse rehearsal and performance, staging and reality. She often recruits family members to appear in her works, wherein they play both the characters and themselves. Through repetition, humor, and absurdity, Oh points to the ways we all play in—or against—the images of consumer culture we see every day. Oh focuses on the strange relationship between intimacy and labor, setting caned romantic Hollywood scenes of her films against commercial backdrops. The artist explores identity in relation to economic labor by examining the ramifications of capitalist society—expressed through video and installation works. She teases out our personal relationships and banal daily experiences as they are set against the flat, colorful, and crowded backdrop of consumer culture. In particular, she asks what the “good life” is and where we come to understand its rules.
New York, NY
Born 1990, Chicago, IL. Raised Schaumburg, IL
2015 MFA University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
2013 BFA Corcoran College of Art & Design, Washington, DC
www.joanoh.com