Rachel Youn's installation "Denial" features a dynamic arrangement of mechanical components and artificial plants, combining the coldness of metal with vivid green hues. The piece incorporates elements resembling industrial tools and floral motifs, suggestive of a surreal synthesis between nature and machinery. Utilizing found materials and kinetic movement, Youn blurs the boundary between animate and inanimate, evoking themes of care and the complexity of human emotion. The work reflects Youn's focus on identity and connection, underscoring the juxtaposition of domestic intimacy and mechanical detachment in a playful yet poignant manner. ...
Rachel Youn animates the forgotten and the overlooked, transforming objects steeped in history and emotion into kinetic sculptures and installations. Their work often begins with secondhand massage devices, baby rockers, or exercise machines—objects once meant to soothe or support the body. Through salvage and reinvention, Youn breathes new life into these forms, merging them with artificial plants and found materials to create hybrids that are at once clumsy, erotic, absurd, and tender. The resulting sculptures resonate with a strange choreography of care—mechanical and human, unsettling and humorous, poignant and playful all at once. Youn’s practice is rooted in personal and collective identity. Through their kinetic works, they reflect themes of aspiration, immigrant experience, and the bittersweet failures embedded in domestic objects. The sculptures—jittering, gyrating, seeking motion—channel queerness, cosmic loneliness, and the yearning for connection. Movement isn’t just form—it’s a metaphor for persistence, longing, and the fragility of hope. Their approach is both tactile and conceptual, mining suburban liminality and the promise—and failure—of household machines. Through witty choreography, Rachel Youn’s sculptures become emotional stand-ins: ersatz caretakers, awkward dancers, intimate companions in motion. ...
