You are here:
Contemplating the Streets of LA
Installation
2003
Between 1999 and 2003, I took photos through the windshield of my car, documenting my daily transit from one fragment of Los Angeles to another. 74 of these photos were mounted into snow globes, transformed into objects of memory and nostalgia. Each snow globe was labeled with a word or phrase and arranged to form a textually cohesive yet visually arbitrary narrative on a scaffolding structure. The viewer was invited to “enter” and rearrange the snow globes to create their own narrative or meaning. Each new rearrangement takes the place of, but does not completely erase, the original narrative.
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Upstairs at the Market Gallery
Los Angeles, CA
April 5 - 30, 2003PROJECTS 2004: YOU ARE HERE, HELEN H. KIM
Sweeney Art Gallery
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA
February 11 - May 8, 2004DRIVE TIME (group show)
Wignall Museum
Chaffey College
Rancho Cucamonga, CA
August 15 - September 24, 2005
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Karen Rapp
Sweeney Art Gallery
University of California, Riverside
February 2004Helen H. Kim is an artist and resident of Los Angeles, a place that figures prominently in her interactive installation You Are Here. Contemplating the streets of LA from the driver’s side window of her car, Kim photographs ordinary scenes and settings that are at once quintessentially “LA,” yet nowhere in particular. Her journey, and the recording thereof, is more complicated than a drive-by sighting: Kim combines snapshots with fragments of phrases from a text, and mounts them on snow globes. In all there are more than seventy individual globes on display for the visitor to re-arrange in any order, to create an “LA Story” of their own choosing.
Kim is an Angelena who, like most, commutes; it is during her commute, over the last four years, that she has used her transit as a time and space to contemplate and create her artwork. Much in the spirit of the early modernist flâneur, whose painted and literary depictions of the city landscape awakened a new urban consciousness, Kim records her own existence in an environment in flux. Her work is an outgrowth of other investigations, for instance, of the Beat generation and 60’s artists, such as Ed Ruscha, who embraced the new American landscape of the automobile and inspired a fascination with the experience of movement, of traversing the city. Kim’s installation expands and activates such themes of modern art by allowing the viewer to construct their own path through many fragments of the urban landscape of Los Angeles.
As viewed through the front windshield of Kim’s car, the landscape of signs, billboards and fast-food restaurants is as familiar as any American city were it not for the glitz of LA lights and the backdrop of palm trees. The fact that the everyday scenery of Los Angeles is recognized worldwide through music videos, movie sets and news footage makes it all the greater of an iconic American experience, an aesthetic that Kim reinforces with grainy video-like snapshots often blurred around the edges. The images contained within the globes are at once documentary and mildly fictive, perpetuating both realities and myths.
Of course the snow globe is a universal souvenir, typically commemorating monuments and mascots in kitschy saccharin form. Kim’s snow globes invert the notion of landmark and preciousness by presenting the seemingly banal. Her depiction of Los Angeles is personal and yet, at the same time, formally generic. By allowing us to arrange these object/icons and create new associations between images and text, each visitor is able to perform the role of the flâneur, traversing the city with a wandering and associative eye.