BIOGRAPHY

April 1, 1976  Born Seoul, Korea
1977-1980  Tehran, Iran, Rome, Italy, London, UK, Paraguay, South America, Uruguay, South America
1980-1994  Cerritos, Ontario, Glendale, La Canada, Ojai, CA
1994-1997  NYC, NY, Miami, FL
1997-2001  Los Angeles, CA
2001-2002  Pagosa Springs, CO
2002-Current  Los Angeles, CA

EDUCATION

1992 Art Center College of Design Summer Program
1993 RISD Summer program
1994-1996 Attended Parsons School of Design, Illustration Major

WORK EXPERIENCE

1997-2002  Randall Stokey Designs
Designing and creating custom murals and decorative work. Managing all aspects from design to implementation directly with clients. 

2002-Current  Sedi Studios, Inc. 
Founded her own company. Working directly with high-profile designers, architects and builders such as, Limited Brands Inc., Victoria's Secret, Kelly Wearstler, and Young Lee.

EXHIBITIONS

2019 Ideas About Materials: Asian Contemporary Sculptures / Kylin Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA, July 27 - September 28, 2019

2018 Rooted / Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA, November 18, 2017 - January 6, 2018

2017 Movers & Makers / MOAH, Museum of Art & History, Lancaster, CA, February 11 - April 16, 2017

2014  Un Seul Grain de Riz / Galerie Metanoia, Paris, France, December 19 - January 10, 2015

2014  Haag Needlepoint Collection / MB Abram Galleries, Los Angeles, CA, November 13, 2014

2014  Informationary / Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA, October 11 - November 7, 2014

2013 Project Heart: Uganda / Long View Gallery, Washington, DC, October 26, 2013

2012 Project Heart: Uganda / 525DowntownLA Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, November 3, 2012

2011 Project Heart: Uganda / Bradford Stewart Art Gallery, Culver City, CA, November 5, 2011

2010 Project Heart: Uganda, Inaugural Annual Fundraising Multimedia Art Benefit, For World Children's Initiative / House of Sweden, Washington, DC, December 16, 2010

ARTIST STATEMENT

Rings of Time ​are a physical record of my journey across time, honoring both the turbulence and the joy. A tree’s rings tell the story of its experience and of the environment around it: droughts, abundance and changes in the environment. In ​Rings of Time,​ I make external the rings of my own tree.

My life was never a straight, perfect, linear journey. There have been deep curves of difficult times, wonderful blooms of great times and of wide abundance and narrow challenges. From this comes the sculptures’ beautiful, odd and imperfect shapes. I create them from 3/4 inch birch plywood. Birch plywood begins as a natural material but once harvested from the forest, it undergoes a highly industrial process. The trees are cleaned, pressurized, cut and then sold as sheets of plywood. I precisely cut each piece and reshape this processed material back into its organic form. The process mirrors our own human journey. We are born naturally but then shaped and distorted by inorganic, industrial experiences. Our personal journeys become then, to try to return to the natural, organic form with which we started our lives. The greatest challenge of each tree sculpture is to find balance so it can stand on its own. It took many years of experimenting to precisely engineer them so that gravity became their friend instead of their foe.

Presented alongside ​Rings of Time ​are ​The Apples. ​My apples are about celebrating youth: about the thrill of first tastes and first experiences. I remember so vividly eating my first apple as a child and that perfect, first, crunchy bite. My senses were so aroused by the incredible flavor and texture and by its inviting red shape. ​ The Apples freeze in time the wonder of that first bite.

CURATORIAL ESSAY

SEDI PAK: NATURE AS STRUCTURE

By Peter Frank

More than any other art form, architecture springs from observed experience. From the first, humans have built shelters, containers, and ceremonial sites according to what the vicissitudes of nature demand – and what forms in nature itself suggest. Or, to reverse that consideration, there is an architecture to nature – a natural architecture, if you would, or perhaps many natural architectures, and we identify the purpose of each with the phenomenon it serves. A cell is a cell, a spine is a spine, a limb is a limb. In nature, architecture defines typology.

Nature thus frames the human impulse to invent, and by extension rules our artistic output, as subject and as fundamental impulse. (Jackson Pollock was asked if he painted from nature. “I am nature,” he responded.) In this regard, Sedi Pak’s work situates itself between subject and impulse, drawing at once on the forms nature determines and on the energy it projects in making those determinations and sending them into action. Trees are Pak’s touchstone forms, but the elongated form of the branch appears in many natural ways, and Pak’s pursuit of the form rather than just the subject leads her well beyond the easily averred grandeur and pathos of the higher-order flora. 

Pak’s recent environmental and installational work does concentrate on trees, focusing on their physical presence – amplifying their associations, isolating and amplifying their beauty and evocative power – and celebrating as well their iconic fecundity. These works currently exist as maquettes and proposals, miniaturizing and clarifying the dynamics – the theatrics, almost – of such arboreal celebration. But even in these intimate mock-ups Pak’s fervent embrace of trees as real things and as symbols – a transcendent take on tree-hugging, if you will – echoes the grace and magnificence of their models and subjects. She might select one tree amongst many in a grove or clearing and “frame” it in a re-contextualizing box, a Euclidean declaration of admiration for a distinctly non-Euclidean (if anything, fractal) natural design. Or she might devise transparent boxes in which (originally tree-borne) fruit, in various states of decay or human consumption, has been improbably suspended, defying not only the absence of tree or person, but gravity itself. 

It can be said, however, that Pak’s most thorough integration to date with growing things – with the power of nature that drives form and energy alike – manifests not as plants per se (although their most ambitious fabrications are built of plywood) but as hollow, asymmetrically bent trunks that seem not simply willing, but forced, to grow erratically. Indeed, whatever makes them twist and bulge, constrict and writhe, also makes them enlarge. These burgeoning funnels could be mimicking sea creatures, flora and fauna alike, or the more extravagant parts of insects (exaggerated in size, of course) or mammals. They even conjure meteorological phenomena. In that latter respect, they present themselves as frozen waterspouts, tornadoes caught in mid-rampage, or the flow of water, slightly viscous with detritus, down partially obstructed drains. (Some have noted their evocation of musical instruments, notably brass, but they seem capable only of playing themselves.)

Sedi Pak’s free-standing sculptures – and the formal fabrication drawings she produces for them – are capable of invoking a host of formal and poetic associations. Furthermore, the drama of their shape is enhanced by the sensuousness of their material presence, whether polished wood or clay or metal or, in the case of the drawings, paper and ink. These looming, eccentric figures – for figures are what they are, upright, seemingly in motion, invested with character, like trees – might issue from Pak’s imagination and handiwork; but each asserts an autonomy, a self-possession as dignified and yet as fragile as any being’s. At their height they might seem threatening, but instead they exude a mournful agitation, as if they were continually foraging in some semi-barren clime. Finally, though, they convey most emphatically a sense of endurance, an existential indomitability that reflects our own back at us. No matter how much sustenance they can find, they are survivors. As are we. As are all living things. They’re built that way.

    Los Angeles

    April 2016

Press

Sedi Pak's Morphic Nature: Huffpost Arts & Culture  By Shana Nys Dambrot

Price List

LETTERPRESS PRINTS OF ARTIST’S RENDERINGS
Antique Black Ink on 4-ply White Museum Board
11 x 11 inches
# 1-10 Unframed $180
# 11-15 Unframed $220
# 16-20 Unframed $260
# 21-24 Unframed $280
# 25 Unframed $320