a branch to turn on the light

playinghouse presents the two-artist exhibition "a branch to turn on the light", a multimedia rediscovery of the objects that populate our everyday lives. Oil paintings and light-based creations by fresh voices Fernan Bilik and John Junior Kim each transform the familiar—a candle, a coin, a house plant—into subjects of renewed wonder.

Curated by Angela Yang, Clara Leverenz, and Sophie Taylor, "a branch to turn on the light" derives its title from Bilik’s featured depiction of a light switch operated by a tree bough—a humorous, nearly surrealist extension of one’s own limbs and an encapsulation of the playful rhetoric of the exhibition. Kim echoes this sense of wonder as it relates to his light creations: “Lighting cannot be ignored … it feels marvelous, as the idiom of when a lightbulb goes off in your head suggests.”

A curious expansion of the quotidian threads through the work of these two artists, extending an open invitation to play with everyday forms in a poetic and dreamlike world.