ILBASO, is the first site specific work developed collaboratively between item idem and W/—— Projects. As an experiment in using non-traditional spaces within the museum for exhibiting art, the revolving door in the lobby of the Museum of Art and Design has been transformed into an interactive installation.
A pattern inspired by the iconic stripes of a barber's pole, Ilbaso presents a scalar and contextual disruption that enhances and blurs the threshold between the public space and the museum. Upon entering and leaving visitors take on the performative role of activating the artwork that transforms into a spectacle by drawing in the public as its audience. Revolution, the mechanism generating the anamorphic illusion, becomes a metaphysical double entendre.
The barber's pole, often perceived as a cheerful anachronism, exists in an aura of various meanings both obscure and obsolete. Commonly representative of blood and bandages from medieval surgical procedures, the stripes are also a familiar visual trope in some Asian countries referring to brothels, known in Korea as "Ilbaso".
ILBASO celebrates the importance of visualizing cultural forces and revealing space in the cracks created by the inevitable - and often chronologically incongruous - destabilizing what is known as familiar, wherein to incubate and deploy new alternates to the the seemingly mundane.
