Byron Kim: Color, cosmic and personal
c"Synecdoche" is a piece composed of monochrome panels, each one a rectangle about the size of a face. Laid out in an array, the varied browns, tans, yellows and pinks recall shades of makeup. But on closer look the colors become too bright, too raw, too dark for cosmetics.
Each panel turns out to be the color of an actual person's skin, copied by the artist in a 20-minute sitting. Some of them are Kim's friends, others are strangers. Now numbering nearly 400 panels, the piece presents a population sample of skin color. With the inevitable comparisons imposed by the grid, the minimalist group portrait becomes a study of racial nuance and extreme.
Kim gained attention with "Synecdoche" in 1993, the heyday of multicultural art with its emphasis on the political underpinnings of cultural experience. The piece anchors "Threshold," a survey of Kim's work running through Sept. 17 at the Henry Art Gallery.
Minimalism and cultural issues continue to show in Kim's later pieces but his concerns become less political and more personal. Another piece at the Henry, seemingly a smaller version of "Synecdoche" with smaller and fewer panels, turns out to be a sample of colors in the body of Kim's son Emmett at 1-year-old. The colors of one person in "Emmett" are just as varied as those in "Synecdoche," a contradiction that turns what was politically charged in the earlier piece into perhaps a hopeful statement about potential — the wish to transcend classification.
In a lecture at the Henry Aug. 17, Kim talked about his quest to shift the emphasis in abstract art from big, universal ideas into particular, immediate concerns. He succeeds in a series called "Sunday Paintings" — the title an intentional evocation of amateur work — in which he creates a painting of the sky every week. The canvases range from blue to gray, meditatively stark and therefore dramatic in its shifts of color. In the middle of the empty sky he makes notations in pencil of things happening in his life or in the news that day. The score in a Mets game, his to-do list. Instead of the pull of the sublime we get the interruption of domestic detail and a lighthearted nonchalance.
In other work the artist focuses on the vagaries of memory. At times his approach seems contrived. In "46 Halsey Drive, Wallingford, CT 06492," he creates a painting based on varied responses he got from his family about the color of a house they used to live in. He made them choose the color from hardware store paint chips — an imprecise process, as anyone who's had to choose house paint color would attest.
On the other hand Kim's latest pieces, based on photographs that address the limitations of seeing, are a completely different shift and more conceptually successful even as they abandon the minimalist approach. The series titled "What I See" continues the focus on domestic life. The artist's family, backyard and dining room are presented in three separate pieces in composite images that fill in the difference between what a single photograph is able to capture and what the eye can see from a specific location in time.
Multiple photographs are taken of a single setting, and the photographs are then compiled in Photoshop in overlapping layers that repeat and shift views of the same image. The totality of the experience is a fractured reality that gets presented as if veering off in parallel universes. No one image holds the entire truth, and yet the truth in any partial view remains crucial to the whole.
Lucia Enriquez is a Seattle artist and arts writer: lucia_enriquez@hotmail.com
"Threshold: Byron Kim 1990-2004" 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.- 8 p.m. Thursdays, through Sept. 17, Henry Art Gallery,
University of Washington, 15th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 41st Street, Seattle (206-543-2280 or www.henryart.org).