Mary Jhun calls them "the girls."
Each painting features a girl’s profile — sprouting with machinery, botanical elements, and sometimes even houses and other architectural structures.
These surrealist details, and the girls themselves, stem from Jhun's vivid dream life and have shaped her art for decades.
"Now it's been 20-something years, the girls specifically. And they've pretty much changed every five or 10 years. They've always had the same clean profile line, but now they've taken on a lot more industrial elements. A lot of them have been broken apart and put back together," Jhun said.
Last year, Jhun was diagnosed with sleep apnea, and began using a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine — a device that keeps breathing airways open during sleep. But there was an unexpected consequence.
"The moment I received the CPAP, like a month in, I lost all of my dreams."Mary Jhun, artist
"The moment I received the CPAP, like a month in, I lost all of my dreams," Jhun said. "And I've always been an avid dreamer where it's like I know I'm going to have a good dream tonight, like every night it always felt like that — and hence my paintings, hence being a surrealist."
Without dreams, Jhun worried that her art would suffer.
"In wanting to have a better relationship to sleep health, I was losing the thing that gave me my paintings, which was dreaming," she said. "What do we choose? Do we choose the thing that ignites our creativity, or our health? And I feel like a lot of artists go through that all the time."
"What do we choose? Do we choose the thing that ignites our creativity, or our health? And I feel like a lot of artists go through that all the time."Mary Jhun, artist
Eventually, she found balance and her way back to dreaming — and her girls — while figuring out how to keep using the sleep machine.
Her new exhibit at the Oceanside Museum of Art includes new paintings and large-scale, site-specific murals adorning two full walls in the museum's upstairs gallery space.
Muted shades of blue pepper the art, nodding to the significance of air in her life and this series. CPAP masks and tubes swirl through each girl’s silhouette — a manifestation of Jhun's new reality.
"I was actually becoming a little bit more like my paintings … which is attached to things, which is mechanical, which is not actually being just a pure organic form and actually needing something a lot more mechanical now," Jhun said. "It was such a perfect, healthy realization of: I hated this at first, but I'm looking more like my paintings than I realized. And it made me love going through the process of, a little bit of the nuisance of it. I love it."
"I'm looking more like my paintings than I realized."Mary Jhun, artist
The exhibit also includes ephemera related to her experience with sleep apnea as well as her artistic process, including sleep masks and CPAP tubing, early sketches and research texts.
"In Losing Sleep, I Painted" by Mary Jhun, is on view Saturday through June 15 at OMA. An artist reception is May 3.
