The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art presents the exhibitions Jiha Moon: Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here and Susan Klein: shadow things. The exhibitions will be on view at the Halsey Institute October 24 – December 5, 2015. Admission to the galleries is free. The opening reception on Friday, October 23, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm will be open to the public and include complimentary refreshments and light hors d’oeuvres, provided by Whole Foods and Icebox.

Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Moon harvests cultural elements native to Korea, Japan, and China and then unites them with Western elements to investigate the multi-faceted nature of our current global identity as influenced by popular culture, technology, racial perceptions, and folklore. Featuring over fifty works, Moon blurs the lines between Western and Eastern identified iconography such as the characters from the online game Angry Birds© and smart phone Emojis which float alongside Asian tigers and Indian gods, in compositions that appear both familiar and foreign simultaneously.

Susan Klein’s painting explores questions of time, of accumulation and losses, of spaces that become layered by history. In her paintings, she often combines imagery from separate places and times into one image. Usually, she begins with a landscape painting, sometimes rural, sometimes urban. She then works over these representational paintings, referencing the visual world of objects. The result is an image that is observational, somehow recognizable yet ambiguous. Traces of concealment and revelation remain and the paintings show wear and tear. Irregular surfaces, architecture, botany, gnarly branches, fences, piles of bricks – they swim together to create a dense visual obstacle course.