Williams Street by Ivy Olesen

“dis·till

/dəˈstil/

1. purify (a liquid) by vaporizing it, then condensing it by cooling the vapor, and collecting the resulting liquid. [...]

2. extract the essential meaning or most important aspects of.”

– Oxford Language Dictionaries

“...a shape is one shape until it turns into another shape.”

– Rachel Haidu

Working from liquid memory of everyday objects and domestic interiors, Hea-Mi Kim’s paintings are simultaneously indexes of experience, essences of object memories, and nonfigurative. In their final form, her shapes maintain their own ambivalence, resisting singular interpretations and inviting in viewers’ own associations with form, color, pleats, grids, and other imperfect patterns.

In order to present viewers with object memory distilled in visual form, Kim’s paintings go through a series of transformations and transfigurations. At first, they live as pencil drawings of abstracted shapes pulled from the artist's memory. She translates these shape memories into underpaintings on wood panels, which become blueprints for the holes she cuts into the panels using Japanese pull saws.

At every step, Kim manipulates these shapes, renewing their spontaneity, perpetuating their ambiguity, reasserting gesture, and refining their power as visual indexes of memory. In this process the paintings become palimpsests, and the vestiges of their many layers are visible in the drippings on the paintings edges and in the titles – Hwatu hour, apartment window, ceiling fan, metronome – which preserve the connection between the initial memories and their visual distillations.

Behind the painting, behind the holes, Kim handfolds pleats out of handmade paper, cuts grids out of sandpaper, creating new shapes underneath and within the shapes, providing depth and three dimensionality to the work, and in doing so transforms her paintings once more: into collage, into sculpture.

The pleats recall catholic school girl skirts, hanbok skirts, and rice paper lamp shades the artist’s mother made. The grids recall a history of modernism, traditional Korean hanok windows. The grids are memory matrices. Once covered, the viewer can no longer see out of these windows, no longer go through these holes. Instead, they force you back inside the scene of the painting, back into memory.

Memory of an ex-boyfriend’s ceiling fan. Whirring. Full of dust. Memory of watching your parents watching an old movie, with traditional Korean architecture, in the middle of America. Memory of a window on Williams Street Ghostly, sad. The color red. Memory of a metronome ding, ding, dinging. The color yellow. Bright, quick, a little sour. Distance doubles and distorts. The domestic becomes irretrievable, impossible to reenter. An apartment you no longer have keys to.

Instead these paintings suck you into their own time-sense. These are slow, thoughtful paintings, radically nonreactive to the frenetic turning over of the contemporary cycle of outrage. They have their own gravitational force, requiring a different pacing of introspection and reflection. If you let them, they will coax out your own memory associations with these shapes, colors, and compositions, allow those to accumulate, join the artists, intermingle.

Williams Street coincides with the publication of studio collage series By Central Server Works Press, a handbound collection of collages Kim created in tandem with these paintings. While the paintings dried, the artist made these works on paper from scrap materials in her studio, handmade hanji paper from South Korea and lokta paper from Nepal, sandpaper, mylar, more oil paint. studio collage series is a second show within the show, a portable gallery of a different series of paintings on a handheld scale.

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