Joy Machine presents The Peace of Wild Things, a duo exhibition uniting Chicago-based American artist Emmy Star Brown and San Jose-based Korean artist Danym Kwon. Titled after Wendell Berrys poem, the show brings two distinct practices into conversation around color, memory, and the pull of wonder. It marks Browns second exhibition at Joy Machine and Kwons third.
Across the presentation, layered color operates as a tool for self-discovery, surfacing emotions, dreams, and recollections that might otherwise remain out of reach. Brown works in abstraction, while Kwon turns toward surreal depictions of care and domestic life. Seen together, their paintings suggest how experiences keep resonating long after the initial moment.
Emmy Star Brown
Brown moves between murals and intimate canvases, amassing exuberant geometries in saturated hues. Amorphous forms converse with crisp lines, summoning the emotional charge of magenta, peach, cobalt, and goldenrod. She describes the studio as the place where her inner child emerges, and that playful spirit courses through both her canvases and irregularly shaped pieces on found cardboard. Lines frequently run past the pictures edge, giving the sensation that each composition continues beyond the frame.
Danym Kwon
Kwons imagery tucks miniature scenes of family life into stacks of folded clothes and bulbous vessels evocative of Korean Moon Jars. In these tender arrangements, everyday gestures are safeguarded within larger forms. Shifts of scale mirror how memories fade and return, while soft, pastel palettes convey a quiet intimacy. Kwon draws on her Korean heritage and training in Asian painting traditions, an influence that shapes her attention to negative space.
The diptych What We Hold Dear (2026) pairs a trio of outdoor vignettes with hands cradling the small findings from such excursions, presented in a folding frame with soft, rounded edges inspired by Korean design. Additional 2026 works by Kwon include Our Favorite Path, acrylic gouache on canvas, 18 x 18 inches, and Your Little World, acrylic gouache on birch plywood, 19.125 18.5 1.125 inches. Together, these pieces underscore her care-centered, domestic cosmology.
For both Brown and Kwon, painting is a site to process the past and imagine the future, while insisting on presencethe condition in which wonder and joy can spark.
The Peace of Wild Things is on view from August 28 to October 17, 2026. RSVP to the opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on August 28. Brown will be present.
