Shatto Gallery is pleased to present Uncharted Passage, a solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures by the San Diego based artist YC Kim. This show marks the artist's first exhibition with the gallery and presents an opportunity to view the artist’s extensive oeuvre from the early 2000s to the present. This exhibition chronicles the nexus of the artist’s past and present and her ever evolving internal mindscape. This exhibition will be on view from September 24 to November 3 with an opening reception on September 24th, 2022. 

 

Uncharted Passage showcases a compilation of works that manifests the artist’s undaunted inquiries into unfamiliar domains. Trained as a ceramicist, YC Kim converges her studio practice and teaching, and continues to develop a lexicon to articulate intimate and impalpable moments with clay. Kim’s ceramic sculptures possess visual effects that exude a sense of whimsy and internalized experiences. The artist has paved a deep path to keenly externalize these intangible encounters of her deep consciousness. 

 

Kim’s artwork demonstrates a quality of abstraction and vocabulary of architecture. Take Ice Formation series for example. Granted that it's impossible to bring back the vast and magnificent landscape of Alaska, Kim is keen on extracting the essence of the landscape. This series particularly proclaims the tension between nature versus human, mortal versus immortal, object versus primal element. As goes for one of Kim’s most ambitious installations Frozen Perspective; not only evokes a perspectival experience but coerces a perception of scale.

 

Although Kim’s work is primarily abstract, it concerns itself with embodiment of her innermost experience, both symbolically and figuratively. The Detangled series deals with the death of her spouse. The pieces in this series have a ceramic component and a canvas background that exhibit the movement and texture in which the ceramic piece embodies. This series in part feels like a practice of processing grief and loss, and is based on images formed in the artist's internalized psyche of dealing with loss. 

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Much of Kim’s artistic production is defined by an interest in honing in on the possibilities of a particular media. The possibilities to ensure experience through “shape” and “form” is conveyed three-dimensionally through the convention of ceramics. YC Kim experiments with the embodiment of sculpture and thus ensues both the qualities of abstraction and representation in the form of seriality. Uncharted Passage makes translations of metaphors in her work and disguises the language of ceramics through her seasoned experience.