in a word JEAN SHON
John M. O’Quinn Gallery
September 26 - November 2, 2024
in a word explores traces of loss through the re-generation of ephemera from her family archive. Through sourced images and text, Jean examines rupture/reconstruction, origin/reproduction, and legibility/illegibility as methods of erasure and revelation. This body of work is a dialogue that evolves despite the lack of a living presence; rather, that presence is found and transformed through memories, ideas, oral stories, and conversation.
burn after reading
Can our memory of someone be conjured with only their words?
Can recanting one’s questions, ruminations, hopes, or doubts summon their presence?
Growing up in La Marque, Texas, Jean Shon’s artistic practice spans installation and lens-based work, punctuated by the use of text from historical and personal archives. Shon’s expansive work explores the ambiguity and fallibility of memory, historical fragmentation, and the transmission of intergenerational knowledge. Through questioning the mutability of language and its own ambivalence, Shon disrupts forms of remembrance through obscuring, revealing, or concealing familiar histories otherwise unknowable.
In past work, Shon looked to her surrounding community and the fractured history of the 1867 Settlement, one of hundreds of Black Freedom Colonies in Texas. The 1867 Settlement is built on 320 acres of land in Galveston County, which was purchased and stewarded by four Black cattle ranchers. Continually looking towards an ephemeral and unmaterial archive, Shon worked with wallpaper and salvaged materials from houses on the settlement. In the resulting installation, Wallpaper (1887 Frank Sr. and Flavilla Bell House), the presence of negative space–or emptiness–references Achille Mbembe’s concept of absence in historical memory. An archive constitutes a spectral promise even by its mere absence.
in a word, Shon’s solo exhibition at the Lawndale Art Center, draws from materials in the family’s archives: journals, documents, letters. Shon asks critical questions of remembrance and misremembrance when fixating on the languaging of questions,
Readers are encouraged to burn and offer a mediative
poems, or notes jotted in personal papers belonging to the artist’s late father. The quiet traces of legibility and illegibility offer a form of tender care through connection transferred across hands, languages, material, and time.
The subtle caress of her father’s words through the tracing, blurring, or cropping by Shon’s careful hand are likened to the burial rites of ancestral altar-making. The rehearsal of a meditative prayer, such as recanting a question or love poem, as the slow drift of burning incense reaches our loved ones who have passed.
The processing of languaging–shaping the world with our words, utterances, and symbols–casts a connection between oneself and all those surrounding us, in this life or the next. The traces of languaging are found in the textual, sonic, or sensorial memories of all those who hold our wor(l)ds. Those casting these revelatory markers of meaning make the world shift through only a word. This is no greater task than languaging to those we love.
In the prolonged attention to personal acts of languaging, Shon searches for her father after death, and in doing so, also seeks to fill the intergenerational knowledge gap surrounding her grandfather’s death in the Korean War. The slippages, ruptures, or gaps formed by inconclusive endings invite ritual acts of remembrance.
the accompanying joss paper to prayer to an ancestor.
The two-way dialogue, father and child, past and present, this life and the next, generation to generation, are tenderly remembered with only the words that remain–spoken or written down. Through acts of gestural memory, reenactment, and memorialization, Shon connects us to the father she knew in the words he chose to tell.
Erika Mei Chua Holum, October 2024
Jean Shon is a visual artist and educator working in photography, installation, text, and mixed media. Her work explores memory, identity, loss, melancholia, and recovery in the context of family history and surrounding community. Solo exhibitions include Sawyer Yards (2023) and Box 13 (2023) in Houston, TX. She has exhibited at Phase Gallery and PRJCT in Los Angeles, as well as solo and group shows nationwide. Jean has been awarded several residencies including Lighthouse Works (2024), James Castle House (2023), and the Galveston Artist Residency (2021-2022). She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California-Irvine and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Erika Mei Chua Holum (she/they) is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston and co-curator of the 2024 Texas Biennial: The Last Sky. Recent projects include the two-city collaborative exhibition Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions with KADIST San Francisco (2024) and solo exhibitions at Blaffer with Cian Dayrit (2024), Saif Azzuz (2025), and Ja'Tovia Gary (2026). In Summer 2024, Erika initiated the curatorial project Sahara Dust Season, an artist residency program activated by forms of knowledge-sharing across regions connected by Saharan dust clouds. They have contributed to projects and exhibitions globally, such as Majority Rule: Myth-making and survival strategies from AAPI artists in Houston at Sanman Studios (2023), makibaka! Fifty Years of Filipino-American Youth Activism at Alief Art House (2021), the Second Edition of the Lagos Biennial in Nigeria (2019), and Obscura Festival of Photography in Malaysia (2018). Erika holds an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois Chicago, a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and is completing a PhD in Art History at Rice University.
index
Works listed in appearance of catalogue:
A Different Life: In a Word, 2024
Embossed print
Ahppa’s Songbook: Michelle / Changing Partners, 2022
Inkjet print
Voyage, 2020
Inkjet print
Philosophy: Philosophy, 2024
Embossed print
Bleed (March 24, 1980), 2019
Inkjet print
Mission
Lawndale is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center that engages Houston communities with exhibitions and programs that explore the aesthetic, critical, and social issues of our time.
About
Lawndale believes in the role of art and artists to inspire and inform the world around us. By serving as an intimate gathering place to experience art and ideas, Lawndale seeks to foster connections between communities in Houston and beyond. Lawndale presents a diverse range of artistic practices and perspectives through exhibitions and programs, including lectures, symposia, film screenings, readings, and musical performances.
Through exhibition opportunities, the Artist Studio Program, institutional collaborations, and the engagement of an advisory board comprised of artists, curators, and scholars, Lawndale seeks within its mission to support all artistic and cultural communities of Houston.
Supporters
Lawndale Art & Performance Center receives generous support from The Brown Foundation, Inc.; the Garden Club of Houston; Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; The Joan Hohlt and Roger Wich Foundation; The John M. O’Quinn Foundation; The John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; Houston Endowment; Humanities Texas and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the federal ARP Act; Kathrine G. McGovern/The John P. McGovern Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation; The Rose Family Foundation; the Scurlock Foundation; the Texas Commission on the Arts; the Vivian L. Smith Foundation; and The Wortham Foundation, Inc. Additional support provided by Lindsey Schechter/Houston Dairymaids, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Topo Chico.
Funding for Lawndale’s exhibitions is provided by presenting sponsors, John Bradshaw, Scott Sparvero, along with sponsors Jereann Chaney, Alexa Clements, Piper & Adam Faust, Marco Hernandez, Amy Holmes, Mary Catherine & Bailey Jones, Emily & Ryan LeVasseur, Jeryn & Walter Mayer, Meghan Miller & Jeff Marin, Adrienne Moeller, Winnie & Nic Phillips, Teresa Porter, Regina & Frem Reggie, Stephanie Roman, Nicole & Joey Romano, Jessica & Blake Seff, Dr. Andre Shaw and generous gifts from the Friends of Lawndale.
This exhibition is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.
