Epoch – Won Jun Seok

Statement

Traditionally, photographs have been viewed in museums and other exhibitions in the form of prints hung up on the wall. In my senior exhibition, I wanted to challenge this norm and present an entirely new way of viewing photographs. The main part of the exhibit will be in the form of a “hologram” box, made of wood, plexiglass, and black and white paint. I created a wooden structure in the shape of a triangular prism with a hollow top surface that is also the slanted surface. The inner walls facing the viewer are painted white while the side walls are painted black within the hollowed-out box. Upon the top surface, I placed a piece of frosted plexiglass that is 36in x 60in vertically so that it rests upon the wooden frame. I utilized a projector that is hung from the ceiling at an angle towards the plexiglass so that an image is formed on the plexiglass surface at a median opacity so that a double image is formed behind the plexiglass on the white painted wood surface. This gives the illusion of a “hologram” or a floating image.

Projected upon the plexiglass, fashion editorial images are presented on their own right in a traditional format, but I wanted to change the way we view fashion portraits that correlates to the changing technology of our current world. The hologram challenges the notion that photographs are in their final form in print or in the digital space. In a way, viewing the photograph in an illusory three-dimensional format transforms the image to become a combination of a sculpture and a photograph. —Won Jun Seok

Bio

Won Jun was born in Daegu, South Korea and moved to the United States in 2010. He has since lived in Orange County, California and traveled to Nashville to begin his academic career at Vanderbilt University. He developed an interest in photography in his freshman year and began taking film photographs with his Canon A1 that very year. He took both Photography I and Photography II throughout 2021 and 2022 and declared an art major in 2022. He majored in psychology and art.

With his involvement in Strike Magazine as a photographer beginning in the fall of 2021, he was able to expand his skillset to the fashion editorial realm. He gained further experience in commercial photographic work with his internship at Skoop Marketing in the summer of 2022. Throughout his career as a photographer, Won Jun has been published by the Nashville Voyager Magazine in an article, had his photographs published in three issues of Strike Magazine Nashville, and spoke as a guest on a podcast with Memento Podcast.

Exhibition