metaphor contemporary art
is pleased to present
Yoko Inoue, installation and drawings and Mie Yim, paintings.

Yoko Inoue and Mie Yim are two artists whose works advance serious ideas through the use of toys and other objects associated with childhood.

With her accumulations of combinative ceramic castings of kewpie dolls, soda bottles, buddhas, toy guns, and pokemon figures, Yoko Inoue investigates the interface of spirituality and commerce. In their massed repetitions she explores the ways in which advertising fosters patterns of consumption and desire finding similarities in the uses of ritual and repetition within the realm of spiritual practice. Her installations suggest the altars of cargo cults merging the sacred and the banal in a thought provoking critique of material culture. Her ceramic icons evoke feelings of belief in shamanistic magic and its power to transform the soul. In her drawings Yoko Inoue uses the symbolic imagery of mirrors, boats and, labyrinths as a metaphor for the journeys of the psyche.

Mie Yim in her pastel paintings utilizes the bright colors and familiar stuffed toys of childhood to explore the fine line between preciousness and subversion, between the sweet and the tart. By invoking sentimentality as the means to explore such adult themes as love, intrigue, fear, dependancy, and risk her animal characters' complex and open ended narratives touch on the latent energies of pubescent fantasies. She has written that, "reality and consistency have little meaning in this psychic dreamland". As in a dream her characters are free to explore all that it means to be human.

Yoko Inoue graduated from Hunter College, N.Y. with an MFA and completed a residency at Skowhegan, ME. She was selected for the AIM Program at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and for a Visual Arts Residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL. in 2001, and attended Art Omi summer, 2003. Yoko Inoue's work will be included in the upcoming Open House: Working in Brooklyn exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2004.

Mie Yim has a B.F.A. from Philadelphia College of Art as well as additional art studies at Tyler School of Art in Rome, Mid Pacific Institute in Honolulu, and The New School and Parsons in NYC. She is also an alumni of the AIM Program at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She exhibited in the Selections Exhibition at the Drawing Center in fall 2003.