As Symbol & Concept

If photographs are conceptualized as an "embalming of time," As Symbol & Concept seeks to revive the ontological index captured within them. Looking speculatively into Andre Bazin’s theory of the Ontology of the Photographic Image, this body of work uses various degrees of specular reflection within a monochromatic palette to evince the fraught relationship between perception, representation, and the precipitation of meanings generated by their tension.

Referencing photographs and transmuting their indexical evidence into paintings, Kimberly seeks to transmute the fixedness of the photographic referent and resurrect a spatial variability flattened in the mechanical process of their capture. Through this process, subtle variations in opacity, texture, and specular reflection amplify the spatial conditions surrounding the work, destabilizing the notion of a singular perspective and insisting on a continual reorientation of the viewer-object relationship that reveals the image as a site of temporal unfolding.

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 ︎︎︎