The Cerritos College Art Gallery is pleased to present Dilectio, an exhibition of work produced by LA-based artist Young Joon Kwak during their time as the 2019 Cerritos College Art+Tech Artist-in-Residence. Created using the specific equipment and processes available at the Cerritos College Plastics and Composites facilities, combined with their own unique artistic prac-tice, Kwak’s work in Dilectio explores the parallel contemporary paranoias of plastic as a dangerous industrial material and plasticity as a mode of being. In this new series of “plasticized bodies” queerness is rethought through the material realm of composited bodies, blurring the lines between the organic and the inorganic, ultimately reflecting how bodies are always already composites of other organisms, multiple forms of matter, and other unseen forces.

As Kwak explained in their initial residency proposal: “At a time marked by increasing anxieties regarding the effects of plas-tics, toxicity, and rapid climate change on both cultural and biological processes of evolution, plastics can also produce new ways of rethinking the potential of body plasticity and improvised identity that is the lived experience of many transgender people (including myself).” At the core of such a project is a uniquely speculative proposal: “instead of the fantasy of barri-cading ourselves from plastics, what creative possibilities can plastics offer us in thinking of new forms of survival, empathy, and understanding of different bodies, and imagining new futures?” The title of the exhibition, Dilectio, is the Latin equiva-lent for concepts such as delight, pleasure, and love, as well as the linguistic root for modern English words like dildo. Follow-ing Paul Preciado’s rethinking of dildos in his book Counter-Sexual Manifesto, Kwak understands the dildo not merely as a replica of living sexual members, but as plasticized tools or bodies that may inform a reimaged conception of new kinds of bodies, new forms of life