As Symbol & Concept

If photographs are conceptualized as an "embalming of time," As Symbol & Concept seeks to revive the existence of life captured within them. Using various degrees of specular reflection within a monochromatic palette, this series of paintings aims to evince the fraught relationship between perception, representation, and interpretation.

By referencing photographs and transmuting their indexical evidence into paintings, Kimberly aims to destabilize the fixedness of the photographic referent and resurrect a spatial variability flattened in the mechanical process of their capture. This process results in painted objects that refuse a single-point viewing experience. Depending upon the viewer’s vantage point and proximity, various gestures of the work are obfuscated in real-time.

Capturing, at once, the indexical past and the spatial present, As Symbol & Concept proposes a revaluation of subject-object hierarchy and the spaces in which they are presented to harness variable depictions of quotidian Black American life.

About the Artist ︎︎︎