Sydney S. Kim
Sydney S. Kim is a Portland-based artist and writer who works in drawing, photography, and poetry. She received her BA in Studio Art from Dartmouth College in 2007, as well as a minor in English with a focus in Creative Writing (poetry). Recently, she received her MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She considers herself to be bi-coastal, having lived for extensive periods of time on either end of the United States, and intends to continue her geographical vacillations in her post-graduate plans.
STATEMENT
Formally and conceptually, my work straddles, surpasses, and traverses boundaries.
My visual work is mainly two-dimensional and explores modes of drawing through a range of mediums, from pencil on paper renderings to layered digital pieces, using meditative aggregations of delicate, tactile marks. Photographic techniques are utilized to create ambiguous depths of field, which parallel the densities built up by my markmaking process. Words in my poetry evoke, activate, and reinforce one another's meanings, sounds, and visual appearances, similar to the way my photographs function in their nonlinear organization.
Form is given to the workings of the emotional realm through the use of visual metaphors and obsessive mark application. Conceptually, my work tends towards the mutable, touching upon subjects such as the natural physicality of geology and water, as well as the intangible experience of psychology and memory. I am interested in placing widely ranging subjects on the same playing field to see where relationships, similarities, and overlaps occur — around this type of fluid connectivity is where my ideas form and work is visualized.