Where the Light Remembers

Kersgallery presents Where the Light Remembers, an exhibition featuring paintings by Amy Wright and Yeon Kyung Park alongside ceramic works by Vika Mitrichenko. Working from distinct approaches, the artists explore the relationship between the visible world and the inner life. A garden, a still life, an everyday object: through the attention we give them, they become intertwined with memories, desires, and the times we live in.

In the paintings of Amy Wright, the landscape unfolds in layers. Botanical forms, fields of color, and patterns overlap; the viewer’s eye finds purchase in a detail only to lose it a moment later. Her background in textile and floral design resonates in the rhythmic structure of the surface. The garden appears as an environment where everything simultaneously grows, shifts, and is obscured from view. Looking here demands movement.

Yeon Kyung Park slows that movement down. In her still lifes, contours soften and colors lie close together. Objects seem present in the way something from the past can suddenly feel near: recognizable, yet hard to grasp. The space around a form receives as much meaning as the form itself. Her paintings leave an opening between what the eye perceives and what memory makes of it.

The ceramic work of Vika Mitrichenko brings this focus on the everyday into contact with the unrest of the outside world. Set against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine, studio life and the continuous stream of war news become intertwined. Drawing, personal reflections, and art-historical references meet on a tactile, fragile surface. The proximity of war makes palpable how fragile the peace of a room or the view of a garden truly is.

In this meeting, beauty takes on a unique tension. It can hold our gaze upon something whose continued existence is uncertain. The flowers, objects, and surfaces in the exhibition each ask in their own way for attention to what easily goes unnoticed.

Where the Light Remembers draws its title from that interplay between presence and memory. Light makes things visible, but it also alters their appearance. Perhaps what we retain most from a place is the way it revealed itself to us at one specific moment, recognizing it only later in an image.