Amy Yeminne Kim
CV & BIO
kima@hope.edu
1. A VISCOUS EMPIRE
(2025)
2. Wolfcamp Catalogue (2020-ongoing)
The Permian Basin stretches across 86,000 square miles of desert in west Texas and eastern New Mexico. Far below this vast emptiness lies the site of my ongoing photographic project—the Wolfcamp Shale—the world’s most lucrative oil producing formation. With an anthropological eye, my project brings into focus the rise of the American nationalism, the colonial history of oil extraction, deal-makings, labor relations, post-colonial ripples, and the prehistoric geology of the carbon bearing Wolfcamp Shale. My square box frames, taking photographs every three miles across U.S. Interstate I-20, and the utilization of playwriting, are examples of the structuralist approach I use to reshape this unflinching universe, conspicuously imperial as it is vulnerably human.
The CaribBasin Recipe Cards bring together geographical regions, inquiry into the medium of photography, and a joy of cooking, all in a series of recipe cards. With these cards, I activate a space that finds Caribbean presence within the carbon bearing oil fields of the Permian Basin of Texas. The cards are designed as a boxed set of four-by-six-inch printed and archivable photographic cards.
PHOTO EXPO is an installation thatborrows aesthetics from commercial expositions.Here, photos are less documentative and more bodily. I present Photo Expo in a manner accessible for all with installations meant to be interactive, experiential, and entertaining. Viewers, for instance, can walk on the images, eat the images printed on an Expo Cake, or see themselves in the video and projection live feed. Photo Expo asks us to experiencephotography. The exhibition was conceived as my MFA thesis exhibition in 2018 funded by two competitive fellowships totaling $5,000. It has since been exhibited at the Nancy Fyfe Cardozier gallery at UT Permian Basin.
5. NO WINDOWS
This project was made partly in response to Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation and my questions about meaning in an art piece. I was becoming more interested in how we percieve than the hermanutics in a formal analysis. This inquiry into perception developed into a broader survey into how we experience the photographic medium. No Windows (2017)resulted from this line of questioning. The images were taken in my studio in Slaton, TX as I shot nine hundred images quickly and intuitively.
2019, SPE Multi-Cultural Caucus International Juried Show,
Adrian College Valate Gallery, Adrian, MI
2019 Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery, UT Permian Basin, Odessa, TX
© CARGO TEST 2027