LA artist building structure inspired by Tower of Babel

A 25-foot tower made from scrap wood is set for demolition next month in Claremont. Well... not so much “demolition” as careful dismantling. It’s a temporary art installation called “Babel: the Chaos of Melancholy,” and it’s on view at Pitzer College’s Nichols Gallery. KPCC’s Steven Cuevas followed the Tower’s rise; he has this report.

Steven Cuevas: The electric screwdriver will not cooperate.

Kyungmi Shin is jamming it through the slats of a balcony railing two stories above the gallery floor. She’s trying to secure a piece of plywood to the top of her latest installation called “Babel: the Chaos of Melancholy.”

Kyungmi Shin: I sort of see it as a metaphor about this human desire to reach the sky. There’s this growth period where everyone is building, building, building – and then, now we’re going through the exact opposite side. But I feel like those crazy periods allow a lot of creative ideas to come through as well.

Cuevas: In Shin’s case, it’s a two-story tower that kind of resembles a treehouse built by abstract artist-sculptor Alexander Calder. Pieces of plywood and lime-green Plexiglas jut out at all angles, inviting you to touch them.

Shin: Right now it looks like wild in terms of its angles. It’s very whimsical. I want to calm it down in some sense that I want to make it go back to the feeling of a building.

Cuevas: When I first met Kyungmi Shin last month, the Korean-American’s “tower” was still a skeleton – long rails of scavenged wood and corrugated aluminum that bend toward the gallery’s second story mezzanine.

A few weeks later, the tower’s bones are covered in a patchwork skin of green Plexiglas and colorful rice bags from Africa. Ceiling lights give the glass an ominous glow. Hand-held video footage of a shantytown flickers on one wall.

Scenes from inside a gleaming airport fill another wall. Shin shot the video during a visit to dirt-poor West African nation of Ghana – and a stopover in the much wealthier Persian Gulf country of Dubai.

[Dubai airport interior; baggage claim, announcements]

Shin: The sound is actually from Dubai airport.

That’s the baggage claim area, believe it or not. It looks like some grand mirage, you know? And I thought it was good to use the sound as a point of connection between two places. And the video over there is driving through a shantytown in Ghana. I thought using the sound from the airport was a way of connecting these two places.

Cuevas: Kyungmi Shin says she’s exploring notions of class struggle, rampant consumerism, and unfettered development. The idea was to create a structure based on the actual Tower of Babel described in the Old Testament, but with shantytown materials.

Ciarra Ennis: You know, the Tower of Babel was a complete example of excess and it was built to honor the architects rather than honor the god.

Cuevas: Nichols Gallery curator Ciarra Ennis helped Shin gather much of the scrap material needed to build the 25-foot tower.

Ennis: I think what’s interesting about Kyungmi’s representation of the Tower of Babel is that she’s using just found, recycled, I mean basically junk! To create this Tower of Babel, which is in complete contrast from what the original was built out of, and you think about the incredible displays of wealth.

Shin: It’s like this dream, ambitious reaching for the sky kind of an idea, but with material that is really available to the majority of people in the world as their only choice.

Cuevas: But with this Tower of Babel, Shin is also celebrating the creativity that drives many of the world’s poorest people to make something warm and welcoming out of not much at all.

Shin: The visual playfulness is homage to the creativity I see so much everywhere, like people have to improvise to create a living environment, and this human desire to create something. We wanna make the perfect city, the perfect world, you know. And it seems like we always fail, try again, fail, try again. It seems like that’s the story of human progress.

Cuevas: Kyungmi Shin’s “Babel: the Chaos of Melancholy” is on display at Pitzer College’s Nichols Gallery in Claremont. You can see it, and hear it, through September 11th.