The title of Hyun Jung Jun’s exhibition reads like an incantation, as if upon entering the gallery, viewers will be instantly transformed. Fittingly, “by flame by fog,” Jun’s solo show at Goldfinch in East Garfield Park, conjures a glade, where reality is suspended and unearthly charms work a strange magic. Visitors enter through the back gallery and immediately encounter the building’s vine-adorned windows, kissed by several wax figurines shaped like winged insects. A burst of color hits if you turn around. Jun has painted two walls in broad strokes of reds and blues, creating the illusion of a windswept and misty landscape that dizzies the eye. On small wooden shelves perch more wax critters, their wings extended as if ready to flutter skyward.
There is something quietly unsettling about Jun’s wax creatures, displayed to recall pinned species in a nascent lepidoptera collection and destined to burn. Fully formed for now, but not quite in flight, they suggest in this moment our own positions as humans emerging from more than a year of limbo: profoundly changed, dizzied, and surviving precariously.
Through 7/17: Friday-Saturday, noon-4 PM or by appointment, Goldfinch, 319 N. Albany, goldfinch-gallery.com
