Soomin Jung Remmler: Ordinary Life: Shining Moments

Soomin Jung Remmler: Ordinary Life: Shining Moments

Through Sunday, Oct 4, 2026

Ordinary Life: Shining Moments features multiple series by Soomin Jung Remmler, woven together by themes of time, memory, and imagination. The work is a celebration of everyday life, from childhood to parenthood. The expansive, distant landscapes express moments long past. Small, serene tree lined neighborhood views harken to evening walks Remmler took as a child with her family, and tightly-cropped drawings of Remmler’s own daughter are a present day counterpart. These series, when grouped together, channel the child persona and the parent persona, both beseeching the viewer to pay attention to and seek out these haunted moments of wonder and presence.

The magic of the ordinary is reinforced through Remmler’s choice of material and process, executing hyper real scenes meticulously with color pencil, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal. Using UV pigments, Remmler injects the hyperbolic wonder of a child’s imagination, easter-egging alternative compositions in the drawings, visible with a UV flashlight when in the room is dark.

Remmler plays with themes of imagination and the subconscious in a variety of approaches. In her series of 8×8” drawings, Fragments, the use of reflection and symmetry go beyond directly representing the landscape and evoke otherworldliness, depicting the time between sunset and twilight, when our senses are heightened by the shifting light of day turning to night. In her series of larger scaled works, Discovery of Ordinary Life: Coming Home, Remmler plays with differing foreground and background drawing techniques. Variation between grayscale and color interrupt photo realistic rendering, while the injection of paper planes, folded boats, balloons, and hidden star animals introduce subtle elements of narrative and anthropomorphism.

Remmler utilizes the symbolic nature of landscape as something timeless, persistent, and awe-inspiring, rooted in memories of family trips and evening walks. The works’ relationship to memory draws not only from real experiences, but the aspect of childlike observation which merges experience with imagination, those attributes of the identity formed by books, dreams, and hopes. In these enmeshed scenes, Remmler creates a world to visualize the shining moments that fill her conscious and subconscious mind, a novel methodology in the tradition of landscape drawing.

Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray
Curator and Exhibitions Director