EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Calvin Kim
The enormity of the world is always in relation to the small thing that can be named, contained –needing protection, as it relates to my own precarity of living in wondering and wonderment. My paintings explore this tenuous relationship between naming, knowing, and feeling. Through shifts in scale, moments of magic, and enigmatic atmospheres, vestiges of feelings are stained and emanate from the familiarity of pared down glimpses of lived life: silhouettes, cigarettes, spider webs, cats… The familiar, which is deeply embedded in the personal, can intimately intimate an affective resonance far beyond what can be singularly named.
The slippage and spillage of light that happens between midnight and twilight is similar to when I paint a puddle that becomes a bowl of cereal that becomes a portal. The recurrent rudimentary forms allow me to poetically explore the emotional ambiguity of living life. Or rather, the ability to embrace the simultaneity of multiple emotions.The ensorcelling of mystery, and the ineffability to translate when one holds the breath of a memory is not about accuracy, but a decision to languorously reimagine a sanctuary with hope: a vast world, a distant world, an unbelievable world, that is near. Here, and one that can be touched and lived in.
