AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Deborah Martin Gallery

SYNAPSES New Sculptures by Kim Ye

January 14-February 6, 2010

Artist Reception & Live Interactive Installation
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
6:30-9:30pm

Interactive Installation:

With their bodies connected by shared organs and appendages, live models wear Ye’s latex sculptures in the Deborah Martin Gallery. An experiment in compromise and confrontation, this interactive performance makes literal the relationships that bind humans together.

Kim Ye offers a fiercely intelligent body of work that provokes both fascination and discomfort. In the tradition of William Burroughs, JG Ballard, Donna Harraway, and Jana Sterbak’s infamous “Flesh Dress,” Ye’s anatomical objects populate a captivating interzone of flesh and polymer that blur the boundaries between synthetic and biological.

She is a master of composition and decomposition of new organic form, fully coherent in its execution. Her edgy vision is matched by an alchemist’s command of her materials - latex, nylon, human hair, silicone, wire and wood – whose mad genius betrays the sensibilities of seamstress and surgeon.

At play is a distorted and unrelenting fantasy of organic yet surgically-fabricated humanoid hybrids and cyborgs. Ye’s exquisitely disturbing creations suggest gynecological mutation (umbilical artifact, displaced placenta, intestinal catastrophe), or neurological prolapse of dendrite and synapse, or even post-apocalyptic intestinally-conjoined humanoids lounging on beds of sea kelp.

Yet Ye’s brutally delicate chimeras somehow comfort as much as they disturb – they are totems of our shared human vulnerability and dislocation. Her organisms’ unlikely eroticism transcend repellence and beauty, offering a peculiar familiarity and invoking a surprising sense of tenderness and affinity.

About Kim Ye
Born in 1984 in Beijing, China, Kim Ye is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sculpture, performance, and video. Kim Ye received her B.A. in studio art and graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College in Claremont, California. Her work has been exhibited nationally, and featured in a wide range of publications from Los Angeles, California to Sarasota, Florida. Ye was the recipient of the 2006 Corinne Gilbert Beaver Prize in Art and the 2007 Matthew Klopfleisch Memorial Prize in Art. She is also a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. Kim Ye is the gallery director of The Annex LA alternative art space.

http://www.deborahmartingallery.com