Archive of Ambiguity
Boram Kim
March 2 - March 27
Opening Reception on Arts Night Out
Bo Kim excavates and re-examines photographic histories and museum archives of the past. By closely reinterpreting them through her research method, she rethinks the institutionalized meanings beyond the historical events of the past with an artistic perspective. Through the collection, analysis, and structural rearrangement of archives—based upon historical, natural scientific, and anthropological—sources, the artist aims to capture the moment of a new art form of her own. The specimens in the museum symbolize the institutional coldness of itemization, quantification, and the reduction of human beings to labels and numbers in hospitals, schools, and governments. The taxidermy in the museum participates in many dichotomous conversations: life and death, beauty and ugliness, categorization and uncategorizability. The tension between these dichotomies is like the tension that exists between Korean and Western culture. The friction between normativity is not only within the artist herself, but also in our society at large. Bo Kim realistically draws copies of photographs in the archives of museums using traditional materials in the artist's possession, and explores the elements of records that represent institutionalization—such as tags, strings, and descriptions. Kim points out and analyzes that the objective truth presented by objective historical documents can be quite ambiguous and distorted.
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Bo Kim is an artist-researcher, and educator who is based in both Amherst, MA and Northern Virginia. She was born in Busan, South Korea and holds an MA in Art Therapy and Counseling from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), as well as an MFA in Oriental Painting from Hongik University in South Korea. In 2009, she completed her BFA in Paintings from Dongduk Women's University. Currently, Kim serves as an Instructor of Drawing 110 & 120 and is concurrently pursuing an MFA in Studio Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Department of Art.
Kim's work has been featured in several national exhibitions, including those held at the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Washington, D.C., the Asian Arts & Culture Center at Towson University in Towson, MD, the Korean Cultural Center in New York, NY, the Sejong Center in Seoul, South Korea, and the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, China. In addition, she has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, MI, and is a recipient of The Studios at MASS MoCA fellowship, sponsored by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.