Amy Yeminne Kim
ABOUT
Amy Yeminne Kim
ABOUT
Permian Ribbons
In Korean funerals, two black strips of ribbons austerely drape the photo of the deceased. At homecomings in the Permian Basin of West Texas, the football stadium becomes a sea of sumptuous heaps of ribbons by students sporting their homecoming mums.
I use ribbons to heighten visibility of a universe created by petroleum extraction–armed with technology, bound to its land.
The Permian Basin stretches across 86,000 square miles of desert in West Texas. It is situated over the Wolfcamp Shale, the world’s most lucrative oil-producing formation. My photographic series unpacks how I, we shoulder oil enterprises and resource mining of this century.
More than eulogizing, funeral ribbons are intended to visualize loss. My ribbons reveal subterranean flows, unrealized dreams, and sleight of hands.
Illusion frames my work. The wrapped frames extend boundaries of the image while also blurring the line between image and object. I sometimes rephotograph collaged imagery from field work and archives. I reenact other images.
My creative process, for example the modular nature of my images, follows a linage of artists and theorists from post-structuralist thought such as Rosalind Krauss, Martha Rosler, or Ed Ruscha who used image as a signs. As a former theatre major, I incorporate performance and playwriting into my practice. I am an admirer of performance-based Fluxus artists, VALIE EXPORT, and Bruce Nauman.
My intention is that the viewers experience an otherness, the way I encounter a convulsing territory.