Kim Kei lives and works in Los Angeles. Her process begins with combining and altering everyday objects and natural debris. These malleable sculptures are photographed in several iterations, which become the foundation for her paintings.
Her intricate, improvised compositions exist somewhere between representation and abstraction. Her work is a departure from the figure as a form, yet in its absence the body is implied.
Kim Kei uses painting, photography, monotype, and sculpture to explore the thrust of movement in capturing gesture and form. Her work seeks to resist the pull of gravity, to reject the passivity of objects, instead existing in the transitory process of becoming, a modulation from one instance to another.
As a principle aspect of her practice, Kei scavenges “naturalistic” objects which stand-in as substitutions for the body. Materials like fabric, wood, shells, plastic, paint scraps, and plants become characteristic of skin, wrinkles, boils, bones, wounds, guts, and tumors. Thus bringing the artist’s abstract work into proximity with a bodily and figurative realm through implication alone.
Images courtesy of Kim Kei and Mike Reynolds
Discover: www.kim-kei.com | alterspace.co
