08-07-2023 / 01-26-2024
Ucross Art Gallery
Clearmont, Wyoming
Clearmont, Wyoming
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Looking at our natural environments through the smoke from wildfires, I was struck by how much they reminded me of the paintings by the 19th Century Romantics, such as Albert Bierstadt or Sanford Robinson Gifford, two of my favorite landscape painters of the Hudson River School painters. The painstaking process of building the atmospheric layers for their paintings was a metaphor for creating a myth of the country. I think invoking this process with the photographic medium implies something slightly different. I hoped to gather this history that informs our relationship with natural beauty.
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Many things have happened since then. I became a father of a half-Asian girl, and my father back in Korea passed away. I started turning my camera toward my life, family, and my childhood growing up in Korea. I am deeply interested in how images can be thought of as a form of writing. I am currently working on a book of photographs and text about my past, raising a daughter, being an immigrant, and being a lover from another country.
16 past residents were invited to choose two works for display and to craft a short statement on the relationship, or artistic journey, between them. The first of the chosen works represents an earlier style, subject, or approach; the second exemplifies current concerns. The goal was to create a compelling visual dialogue between the two works in order to illuminate something central to each artist’s lifetime quest. This presentation points to the essential duality of an artistic career: the idea of growth and change in the service of one’s foundational concerns.
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