Janet Eo’s paintings explore immigrant consciousness, an architecture of memory where multiple homes converge and collapse. Her work directly responds to the disorientation of serial displacement, layering the fragments of domesticity to create visual palimpsests that actively resist diaspora's amnesia.
Eo’s artwork documents the places she once considered home, transforming each canvas into a liminal space. Here, a Seoul apartment wall coexists with a Minnesota kitchen, childhood wallpaper patterns overlay satellite views frozen since 2009, and mailboxes from different residences are juxtaposed. These nonlinear arrangements reveal how immigrant memory dissolves physical distance, creating a dialogue between times and spaces.
Yet a lingering disorientation emerges from this remembrance, as memory's sequential logic is disrupted by both personal frequent relocation and collective historical trauma. Eo draws on her Korean roots, employing contradictory tools: maps that survey and expose, camouflage patterns that conceal and deceive. The topographic symbols in her work serve as both, echoing Korea's history of military dictatorship which erased indigenous traditions while forcing Westernization. Her paintings become a paradox: a surface where personal and historical images accumulate and obscure one another, revealing and hiding in equal measure. The canvas reaches saturation, a deliberately illegible surface where the impulse to remember grapples with the gravity of forgetting.
eojaneteo@gmail.com