Myeongsoo Kim

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My work begins with distance: between a body and a horizon, an image and its source, a place and what remains of it. I use photography to stay inside that distance rather than collapse it. Light, atmosphere, noise, and material interruption become ways of measuring what can be seen without claiming to possess it. The images often begin in landscapes shaped by unstable conditions: volcanic fields, desert skies, saline lakes, smoke, glare, darkness. More recently I have been working with the Salton Sea and the Aral Sea, places where disappearance is not simply an absence but a change of state. Water becomes salt, dust, haze, residue, archive. A landscape continues by entering another medium. In the studio, photographs are combined with found images, postcards, fragments of printed matter, metal, wood, acrylic, and small objects. I think of frames as quiet architectures, devices for holding and directing attention. An image may sit behind another image, disappear into the edge of a frame, or return as a small object embedded in its structure. What appears peripheral is often where the work begins. Across these works I am interested in images that remain incomplete. A photograph records something, and it also marks what it cannot hold: duration, scale, history, the distance between then and now. I call this condition gaugeable infinity, the farthest extent that can still be sensed, described, or measured, and the work stays at that threshold, weighing what has arrived against...

Artwork