Se Young Au. A Clearing.

The backdrop in the visiting room

In many prisons in the United States, the visiting area has a photo corner. On the wall is a nature backdrop: forest, waterfall, beach, distant mountains. Visitors stand beside the person inside, in front of that scene, and have a photo taken. The photo is the only thing they carry home from the visit.

Those backdrops are the starting point of A Clearing, Se Young Au's multisensory installation at IAO Gallery on Chung King Road, Los Angeles, from 13 January to 15 March 2023.

A backdrop is a strange thing. It is painted or printed to make the photo nicer, so the people in it look as if they were somewhere else. But anyone looking at the photo knows it is a wall. Between the fake forest and the real people lies a fact no backdrop can hide.

Au does not mock the backdrop. They see it as a wish. A wall painted with trees admits that the people in the room need somewhere else to look.

Silk, mirrors and a table

In the gallery, Au replaces the wall with silk. The textile carries nature motifs, landscapes, in a range of greens: jade, beryl, emerald, moss. Silk is soft and light and moves when someone walks past. It is nothing like a painted wall in a visiting area.

The space holds a visiting table, the kind familiar from prisons, where two people sit across from each other for a limited time. And there are two mirrors facing one another.

Facing mirrors make a corridor with no end. The green silk is multiplied and repeated, stretching beyond the room. A confined space suddenly has depth. The gallery text calls the installation a portal to another realm.

The table keeps the visitor in the present. The silk and mirrors open onto the other side. Both are there; neither cancels the other.

The smell of wet earth

The scent in A Clearing refers to wet earth. It is the smell that rises when rain falls after a dry spell, the smell of gardens, field edges, forest paths.

Au is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Seoul in 1984, who studied photography at Columbia College Chicago and works where digital collage, personal archive, installation and olfaction meet. The smell of earth recurs in Au's practice. For another work, shown at the El Segundo Museum of Art, Au made a digitally printed tapestry infused with geosmin, the molecule behind the smell of soil after rain.

In A Clearing, scent does what silk and mirrors cannot finish. The image shows another place. The smell makes the body believe that place is near. Visitors do not only look at a landscape. They breathe in a part of it.

For those the carceral system has touched, people inside and their families, wet earth is out of reach. Rain outdoors is ordinary for most of us, and a luxury for them.

A consolation

The gallery text describes A Clearing as an offering: the possibility of being carried elsewhere, made for those affected by the brutality of the carceral system. The installation speaks of dignity, resistance and regeneration.

It is not a work of accusation. There are no sentencing figures, no images of bars. It takes one small object, the backdrop, and asks: what if the wish people make standing in front of it could come true?

It is a gentle question, and the gentleness is what makes it hard to forget. A Clearing asks nothing of visitors about prisons. It only needs them to sit at the table, look into the green silk repeating in the mirrors, and breathe in the smell of rain.

Earth is also the central material of Delcy Morelos's El Espacio Vientre, where visitors enter a room laid with soil. In Au's work, earth has no weight. It is present only as smell.