Richard Kagan – Iron Portraits and Sookang Kim – Stones and Vessels

With his series of exquisite black and white photographs of hand tools and work implements, Richard Kagan presents a group of common and familiar objects in ways that make them distinctly uncommon. Kagan explores the inherently compelling features of these items—their sculptural forms and their richly marked and flawed surfaces. Yet Kagan's images go well beyond elegant representation. By carefully arranging how they are lit, by altering scale, and by interpreting them through meticulously crafted silver gelatin prints, Kagan creates wholly new objects. These re-imagined tools have a vitality that stands in stark, strange contrast to the lifeless articles from which the images were drawn. Without contrivance, they assume and assert a complex new range of references and characteristics: a pair of scissors evokes an odalisque in luxurious repose; and an old telephone broods ominously as if guarding an ancient sanctuary. In so gracefully presenting what these objects were and what they have become, Kagan achieves a remarkable balance between the accessible and the enigmatic. Kagan's career as a photographer began in the late 1980s, following a successful career as a furniture maker. He has brought to photography many of the same technical and aesthetic concerns that he had as a woodworker: an appreciation for understated forms, a recognition of the importance of materials, and a focus on precision and excellence in his production methods. Kagan has had a number solo exhibitions in galleries throughout the US, Europe and South America. In 1993, he received a grant from the Arts Council of Wales which allowed him to work in Europe for several months and resulted in an exhibition of landscape photography at the Royal National Eisteddfod in Wales. His work has been widely published in photography magazines, and he is represented in public and private collections including those of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Washington Convention Center, The Free Library of Philadelphia, The State Museum of Pennsylvania, and Lehigh University. Kagan lives and works in Philadelphia. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sookang Kim: Stones and Vessels

Sookang Kim readily acknowledges that her subject matter is insignificant. Yet this is precisely what attracts her to the objects she photographs. She is not interested in things that already matter, that are perceived as important or profound. Instead, she is intrigued by the challenge of the mundane: how to turn a trivial object into something compelling; how to give it vitality and meaning. In some ways, working with existing objects is more straight-forward than starting with a blank slate, yet it also imposes limitations. Kim must re-imagine the object as something new and at the same time take into account all of its inherent physical constraints and cognitive associations. It is a complex puzzle of transformation. Kim undertakes this transformation in large part through a difficult photographic process—gum bichromate printing—that was used in the 19th century. In this process, the image is built up through many applications of light-sensitive emulsion on non-photographic paper. In essence, the object is reconstructed, layer upon layer; its form remains intact, but its essential nature is altered. Ultimately, through Kim's thoughtful reconsidering and reworking, the mundane becomes the sublime. With her series of White Vessels and her series on Stones, Kim has characteristically selected overlooked objects (the vessels come from her own and her sister's kitchen shelves) and turned them into subtle and complex figures and arrangements. With these bodies of work, Kim has minimized the color in her images and has increasingly focused on issues of form and how groups of objects work together. Many of the vessels and stones are arrangements of multiple objects, thereby placing as much attention on the relationship and tension among objects as on the objects themselves. Sookang Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1970. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Seoul National University in 1993, and in 1998 she graduated from Pratt Institute in New York City with a Master of Fine Arts in photography. Kim's background in both painting and photography led her to gum bichromate printing, which offers the predetermined aspects of photography alongside painting's choices about color and shading. Kim has shown her work in several solo exhibitions in Korea and numerous group shows in Korea and the USA. Her work is in both private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Museet for Fotokunst in Odense, Denmark. She is represented by galleries in Philadelphia, New York, and Seoul. Kim lives and works in Seoul, South Korea.