I Spit Myself Out
“Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. […] Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel it.
But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself.”
- Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horrors, An Essay on Abjection, 1982
Exhibited at NARS Foundation Residency Exhibition, Toward a Sentence, June 5 – 16, 2026
2026
Forged steel, string, merino wool
Dimensions: 52” x 28” x 52”
If grief and trauma are elsewhere implied, their individual, corporeal manifestations are magnified in Choe’s sculpture located at the entrance of the exhibition. Positioned where the wall and floor meet, a steel rod seems to sag under its own weight. With its surface bruised and battered, the rod is slouched over a thin string hanging from above, providing a bulwark against the form’s total collapse, recalling the unconscious physical mechanisms that enable everyday motion—life itself—to persist.
by Amanda Chen, June 24, 2026
