Lucy Kim “A Parrot in a Bell”
Lisa Cooley Fine Art
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Lisa Cooley presents A Parrot in a Bell, Lucy Kim’s first solo show with the gallery. A parrot and a bell are both loud, but they are very different things. A bell is one of the most basic means of soliciting attention and conveying information. Parrots are legendary mimics. A parrot in a bell will be very loud. It will also be very imprecise and, as a result of its willed imprecisions, capable of altering reality. Lucy Kim’s relief paintings function according to a similarly absurdist logic. Kim constructs her surfaces using plastic casts of people, objects and environments from her daily life. Before they are mounted onto a panel or frame, her casts are physically manipulated — flattened, folded, stretched, or enlarged — and sometimes subjected to a repeated process of re–molding and re–casting (a practice that the artist likens to a form of “analog Photoshop”). Though they remain physically connected to their source, the scale and proportions of the casts are distorted, sometimes to the point of abstraction. Kim then layers her works with painted images, patterns or motifs culled from advertising and popular culture. These too are often unrecognizable, and exist only as traces — particular colors, lines, curves, and lighting effects — of the original.
By combining three–dimensional lifecasts with two–dimensional painted images, Kim’s works problematize the standard mechanics of representation. Lifecasting is the most straightforward form of sculptural realism available. It bypasses the ambiguities that are intrinsic to all systems of description or translation, and offers instead a direct indexical copy of the thing that it is meant to represent. Like straight photography, its closest two–dimensional analogue, lifecasting purports to communicate a warts–and–all version of the truth. Pictures, on the other hand, are known to lie. Media images, like those that Kim references in her paintings, are meant to provoke, seduce and manipulate our desires; even (or perhaps especially) when they make claims of authenticity and candor. By offering multiple versions of the truth, Kim’s relief paintings breed uncertainty (what’s come to be known as the “Rashomon effect,” after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film). The works elicit curiosity and empathy, repulsion and judgment at once.
Kim cast the couple that appears in Under the Shade of Garbo’s Gaze (Sean and Susan) in recline, as if they had just dozed off while watching television on the couch. The work includes the original resin cast of Sean and Susan, who appear life–sized, but misshapen and deformed. The cast has been reconfigured, torn and flattened. The hard, lumpy parts of the body — Sean’s skull, wrist and knees, Susan’s knuckles, elbows, chest and ankles — are caved in or buckled at the joint. Any indication of physical violence in the work is, however, offset by the couple’s placid demeanor and tender intimacy. It is also relegated by the elegant image of a shadow cast by Greta Garbo’s eyelashes, hard lit from above, that Kim has painted on the surface. Layered atop the cast of Sean and Susan’s bodies, the painted image makes clear the unresolvable tensions — between object and image, surface and subject, real and ideal — that Kim constantly manages to hold in delicate balance.
Kim’s relief paintings are deeply engaged with the politics of desire and the ways that abstract systems of control affect real bodies. Tomorrow, Tomorrow (Leeza Smiles) offers a collection of one hundred and two dental casts of the same gap–toothed smile, arranged like anthropological artifacts in a museum display. Atop these, Kim has painted a wandering strand of curly red hair and number of sesame seeds, which, in Korean parlance, are linguistically associated with freckles. Gapped teeth, red hair and freckles are all identifying marks that can run either extreme in the beauty spectrum. To Kim, such features highlight the fine line that separates the beautiful from the abject, the plucky underdog (the title is an obvious allusion to the idealistic mantra of Little Orphan Annie) and the aberrant freak. Similarly, Kim’s casts and painted images of food maintain their role as indicators of indulgence, yearning, and abundance, but they also have a somewhat perverse relationship with the human body. Kim explains, “The oranges are so similar to skin, with its pores and navel. When I see close ups of skin care ads, and see images of vibrant skin with pores, I think of how similar the human skin is to orange peel. There is a reference to perception and representation of skin color, but in a very abstract way, done totally absurdly.”
A number of the works in A Parrot in a Bell utilize the same stretched cast of orange skin, which has been physically enlarged until the orange’s stem dimple is about the size of a fist. (This enlargement is achieved through a process that involves soaking the cast until it reaches the desired size.) The works are painted with various designs and in various colors. A few of them are orange, but only because Kim has adorned them with images of peeled carrots. In the case of the vertical, five–panel painting, The Flashing Pass, the carrots have been posed atop a blue tinted mirror, similar to the type of glass that adorns many skyscrapers. Grossly enlarged, stretched and painted blue, the skin of an orange begins to resemble something closer to that of a pachyderm. Arranged in a vertical stack, the paintings also echo the stacked sculptures of Donald Judd, whose reliance on corporate aesthetics (of architecture, in particular) was made readily apparent by Dan Graham’s conceptualist critiques of minimalism in the late–1960s. That such a wide range of allusions can be drawn from an ostensibly simple still life of carrots and oranges is a testament to the work’s intelligence. A carrot and an orange are both the same color, Kim seems only to want to remind us, but they are very different things.
Lucy Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised between South Korea, Myanmar, and the United States. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2007. She attended the Yale Summer School of Art and Music, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship from Yale, as well as the Boston Artadia Award. She is a founding member of the collaborative kijidome, and is currently Lecturer in Fine Arts at Brandeis University. Kim lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Media
Schedule
from January 11, 2015 to February 15, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-01-11 from 18:00 to 20:00