JAKUPSIL

Jakupsil is pleased to present recent works by Taezoo Park, Paul Choate, and Alberto Ballocca at Focus Art Fair 2026, Booth A6, taking place in New York City. Bringing together artists working across installation, painting, sculpture, and machine-driven media, the booth is organized around a shared inquiry: what remains of the human when technology accumulates, ages, and is discarded—and what new forms of meaning emerge from that residue. Each practice approaches the boundary between human intelligence and mechanical or digital systems from a distinct position, mapping the psychological, cultural, and material stakes of living alongside the machines we build and abandon.

Taezoo Park (b.Korea, based in New York) is an artist and digitologist whose practice began with abandoned CRT televisions on the streets of New York—objects that became not mere found material but phenomenological encounters with technology as a living, context-dependent entity. Combining obsolete and transitional technologies with contemporary computational systems, Park’s long-running Digital Being series enacts Deleuzian processual becoming: works that are continuously reconfigured through the movements, breath, and presence of viewers. His practice is grounded in rigorous research—collaborations with social scientists at Cornell, a residency at the LES Ecology Center, restoration work on Nam June Paik’s artworks—and draws on Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard to interrogate simulation, knowledge, and the shifting boundary between reality and virtuality. Park teaches new media art at Pratt Institute.

Paul Choate (b.1984, USA) builds machines and teaches them to paint. Calder and Ada—his custom-built robotic collaborators, developed through bespoke hardware, brushes, and AI-driven systems—are not tools but interpretive agents, capable of producing work with a logic of their own. Glitch, fragmentation, chromatic shift, and compression artifact are not aesthetic references in this work—they are native behaviors, the marks a machine makes as it processes and misreads. At a moment when many artists pursue algorithmic perfection, Choate pursues algorithmic honesty: each painting is a record of the exchange between human intention and mechanical innocence, a mirror held up to our systems and contradictions, unfiltered.

Alberto Ballocca (b.1993, Italy) works across painting and sculpture, both rooted in instinct, accumulation, and deliberate surrender to the unknown. His canvases build psychological interiority through layered gestural marks where images surface organically from the subconscious. His new sculptures extend this language into three dimensions through an unexpected material: discarded and obsolete technological objects—salvaged components, redundant hardware, spent media—assembled not as critique of obsolescence but as archaeological inquiry into it. Where Park and Choate interrogate what digital technology is becoming, Ballocca examines what it leaves behind, finding in these abandoned objects a symbolic weight closer to ancient artifact than modern detritus.

Jakupsil is a transdisciplinary collective with a nomadic gallery program based in New York and Seoul. The Korean term jakupsil refers to a studio, atelier, or laboratory—a space of making through which the collective activates vacant urban sites with exhibitions and artist-led interventions that intersect art, architecture, and cultural production, with the aim of expanding the scope of architectural and curatorial practice.