With her show Interstitial, Chloe Jeongmyo Kim has transformed the Proxy Gallery into a kind of theater, in which the internal struggle of an immigrant artist grappling with unfamiliar visual landscapes is played out in three dimensions. The work centers on her feelings of disorientation and her aversion to certain colors and types of architecture she has encountered in her travels through the U.S. She represents this offensive visual blandness with a reference to butter, which symbolizes the pervasive, suffocating monotony of strip malls and sun-drenched stucco. Kim invites disorder rather than resolving it, allowing the space of the gallery to retain the tension of being in between.

As her first experiment with installation, Kim’s "Interstitial" uses the unique space of the Proxy to stage the pressure and chaos of making a space your own, and of inserting yourself into a space. Using layers of painted plexiglass shards stacked against a backdrop of torn creme-colored paper, she breaks apart the landscape in order to reassemble it in a more accommodating manner.

For Kim, the portrayal of space is as much internal as external. “The idea of the space that I represent can never be experienced through Google Maps, Google search, web images, or Instagram. It is from my real transient experience,” Kim said.

M.H.