Project 304

Life's a Box of Chocolate: A solo exhibition by Jibby Yunibandhu
July 23 - September 10, 2000
Opening Reception: 5PM, Sunday July 23, from 5 pm. Onwards.
Closing Reception: 5PM, Sunday September 10, from 5 - 7 pm.

Project 304 presents Life's a Box of Chocolate a solo exhibition by Jibby Yunibandhu. Jibby's autobiographical work investigates her loss of childhood's happiness and the destruction that accompanies it. Playing on the delicate line between discipline and punishment, Jibby's work is both beautifully aggressive and eerily reserved. In Life's a Box of Chocolate, Jibby introduces a work in chocolate that adapts and transforms to the surrounding elements. By using chocolate, she asks the audience to participate in her delectable annihilation. From chocolate to paintings to wax, Jibby uses various mediums to explore her childhood. It is a tension every gallery attendee understands and Jibby invites us to join in.

The exhibition will reflect the artist's versatility in mediums. Works presented include A wax installation, a mixed media installation, chocolate lollipops, as well as many others. Life's a Box of Chocolate is bittersweet nostalgic journey that promises to appeal to the sentiment.

Receiving her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, this is her first solo show in her native city of Bangkok. Versatile in many mediums, her work ranges from wax castes to film to print to painting. In 1995, her work was featured in New Faces in a New Space, an exhibition at the Betty Rhymer Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. In 1997, she participated in the Chiangmai Social Instillation as well as the Bangkok International Art Film Festival. In 1999, she exhibited at New Talent 1 at the Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago. Additionally, last year she helped organize the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival 2.

Who am I? And what am I doing here? I have been asking myself these questions for the longest time and still cannot find the answer. My life is full of: what if? If I disappear tomorrow, nothing is going to change. My art is a quest for self-knowledge.

Between here and there, I dig up my past and try to make sense of my present. Not at anytime have I felt like I belong with my family, or my friends, or society in general. Waking up every single day trying to find a reason to put on a normal face to meet the people of the world is a struggle. Sometimes I have to take my life less seriously and try to keep myself sane. My art is the non-living me. It could be as depressed and as suicidal as I am. It could have a face and a voice, but no one would commit that non-loving me to an asylum.

Self-portraits are very important to me. I learn who I am a little by little. Since I was a child I have been doing self-portraits. I remember drawing four people, mom, dad, my sister and I standing with big smile in front of our house-cartoon style with black bold outline. Now I'm doing a lifelike, life size wax sculpture of myself, hands and feet tied up, eyes blindfolded, sitting on the floor ready to be executed. What went wrong? Where did that ideal family go?

In recent years, my works have been self-portraits concentrated on the theme of self-destruction. Some works were physically destroyed, some were abstract in appearance, and some were done sarcastically. This year I am continuing the self-portrait with: (1) The sarcastic side of life and death and what's in between. (2) Messages that are so honest, but so wrong to say. (3) Anger that has festered into guilt. All of these concepts will still manifest in the traditional self-portrait forms of painting and sculpture.