Make Room’s second location is a lofty high-rise apartment in Downtown LA, its access requiring an appointment and a personal escort from Zachariah Buteux, the gallery’s associate director. A sterile entrance and elevator ride is soon replaced by a cozier interior: a studio apartment-turned-gallery space, complete with a kitchen, bathroom, and multicolored velvet floor sofas. An iteration of Make Room’s “In Situ” series, Youngmin Park’s solo exhibition Holes in the Cityis in true dialogue with its location. In departure from many of her previous large-scale paintings, the artist activates site specificity in a much more restricted scope than the genre’s predecessors, citing its core tenets yet eschewing the sensationalist artmaking gesture.
In her current solo show, Park, who also tends toward figurative work, turns to cityscapes and the understanding of one’s place within them. While each piece has its own affective color palette, Park seems not to portray urban landscapes with any bias; rather, she exposes their potentiality for stillness. This is achieved, in part, by a precise and strategic framing, both in what is allowed to be seen and the physical spatiality of each work. Hole in the City (2025) is framed by six-inch-thick raw wood, which focalizes its subject: a bright crimson ceramic fly pinned to the center of a small, grey streetscape sketch. The terrain of Wavering gaze (2025) is eclipsed by a face staring directly at the viewer. City eyes (2025) foregrounds two traffic lights, the infrastructure of the surrounding city blurred into a serene dusk. Between examining each work, the viewer is confronted with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook Downtown LA’s skyscrapers, parking garages, and warehouses. The muted rush of the city is impossible to overlook; it, too, becomes part of the exhibition, its commotion noticeably silenced.
Park’s quasi-three-dimensional works demand closeness—the largest piece is twelve inches across. The viewer is forced to lean in to discover a painstaking ode to material and detail: the enamel-coated ceramic fly of Hole in the City, the carved-out holes of Rest (2025), which reveal painting underneath, the sliver of vellum between paper and sage linen matting seen in Wavering gaze and Looking inside the buttonhole (2025). Some works, such as Wavering eyes (2025), are modular, consisting of two discrete parts which slot into each other and can be rearranged with other works. To demonstrate, Buteux took its composite pieces apart—a tactile action that felt private, physical, alive. There is an intimacy found in experiencing Park’s works within their given space, one that remains scarce and elusive in traditional white cube settings.
What Park achieves is a moment of interiority and grounding amidst the depersonalization of urban landscapes. She does not seek to conquer or essentialize the city’s space; she looks outward only to look inward. In works that seem to exclude human presence, Park quietly asserts herself through the carved depressions of a pigeon’s eyes, through minuscule buttonholes, through an apprehensive stare half-obscured by a fly. Our gaze is mediated by the relegated and overlooked—pigeons, flies, industrial buildings, mundane infrastructure—through which Park grants us a place of stillness and freedom. Her work requires an embodied attention, for which the viewer is rewarded with a soft yet restless glimpse into the artist’s reckoning of her place within her lived environment. — Jubilee Par