Killjoy Collective presents In/Exteriors, a two-person exhibition at featuring new works by Portland-based artists Subin Yang. and Nikke Vene.

Subin Yang

Subin Yang is an illustrator and graduate of PNCA (Pacific Northwest College of Art)
in Portland, Oregon. Inspired by themes of home, culture, nostalgia, and daily life,
Subin creates scenes full of vibrant colors and details. Yang’s work ranges from collaging various traditional media to digital illustration, reflecting her love for experimentation. She is from Seoul, South Korea, where she escapes to every now and then for some comfort food like oily rolls of tuna kimbab and sweet and spicy tteokkbokki.

Yang writes of her most recent body of work, “Home is traditionally connected to an
idea of a permanent, solid, and physical house but even structures like a house start
feeling disposable when moving frequently — almost like shedding a layer of one’s life.
Through making abstract digital collages out of the most vibrant memories or
immediate connections to each places I’ve lived, such as specific colors, sound, and
nostalgic details, the disposed places of the past that I used to call home form fluidly
as flexible structures.”

Nikki Vene

Nikki Vene's most recent series of paintings, Night-Walk, explores architectural spaces in and
around the city of Portland. These paintings reference her personal perspective as solitary
spectator, a city-goer who traverses by foot, and due to her nocturnal tendencies, mainly at
night. Within Vene's artistic practice, she engages in acts of flâneurie, a removed, somewhat
voyeuristic form of observing the urban landscape. This curious yet distanced way of looking is
first documented by photographs taken on the street, so that details of the momentary
observation may be referenced later on in the painting process.

When translating the image onto canvas, the ordinary, quiet spaces found in Vene’s
photographic work begin to transform from strict representation into spaces of abstraction, or
other worlds of reality all together. These painted architectural spaces call upon the viewer's
imagination to fill in the blanks, to complete the image, to discern areas of ambiguity or to fully
immerse themselves in its illusion. The viewer has full autonomy to witness painted worlds as
their own, taking on a sense of empowerment and the position of the realized dreamer.