online gallery schedule details "You Are Here" installation view online gallery schedule February 11 through March 20, 2004 Reception, Saturday Feb. 14, 2 to 4pm details Helen H. Kim is an artist and resident of Los Angeles, a place that figures prominently in her interactive installation You Are Here. Contemplating the streets of LA from the driver’s side window of her car, Kim photographs ordinary scenes and settings that are at once quintessentially “LA,” yet nowhere in particular. Her journey, and the recording thereof, is more complicated than a drive-by sighting: Kim combines snapshots with fragments of phrases from a text, and mounts them on snow globes. In all there are more than seventy individual globes on display for the visitor to re-arrange in any order, to create an “LA Story” of her own choosing. Kim is an Angelena, who like most, commutes; it is during her commute, over the last four years, that she has used her transit as a time and space to contemplate and create her artwork. Much in the spirit of the early modernist flâneur, whose painted and literary depictions of the city landscape awakened a new urban consciousness, Kim records her own existence in an environment in flux. Her work is an outgrowth of other investigations, for instance, of the Beat generation and 60’s artists, such as Ed Ruscha, who embraced the new American landscape of the automobile and inspired a fascination with the experience of movement, of traversing the city. Kim's installation expands and activates such themes of modern art by allowing the viewer to construct her own path through many fragments of the urban landscape of Los Angeles. As viewed through the front windshield of Kim's car, the landscape of signs, billboards and fast-food restaurants is as familiar as any American city were it not for the glitz of LA lights and the backdrop of palm trees. The fact that the everyday scenery of Los Angeles is recognized worldwide through music videos, movie sets and news footage makes it all the greater of an iconic American experience, an aesthetic that Kim reinforces with grainy video-like snapshots often blurred around the edges. The images contained within the globes are at once documentary and mildly fictive, perpetuating both realities and myths. Of course the snow globe is a universal souvenir, typically commemorating monuments and mascots in kitschy saccharin form. Kim’s snow globes invert the notion of landmark and preciousness by presenting the seemingly banal. Her depiction of Los Angeles is personal and yet, at the same time, formally generic. By allowing us to arrange these object/icons and create new associations between images and text, each visitor is able to perform the role of the flâneur, traversing the city with a wandering and associative eye. In 1996 Kim received her BFA from U.C.L.A. Last year a solo show was held at Upstairs at the Market Gallery in Los Angeles; Her work has also been exhibited at Millicent Gallery, Silverlake, CA; Beyond Baroque, Venice, CA; Diana Zlotnik Studio, Studio City, CA; Purple Gallery, Mar Vista, CA; The Living Room, Santa Monica, CA; Globe Gallery, Roswell, NM; and Beyond the Faversham in the Leeds, U.K. Many thanks to Gary Ferguson and Mitra Abbaspour for their involvement with this project. contact info Sweeney Art Gallery Watkins House 3701 Canyon Crest Drive University of California, Riverside Riverside, CA 92521-0113 Gallery hours Tuesday - Saturday 11 am to 4 pm (New Area Code) Phone: 951/827-3755 Fax: 951/827-3798 E-mail: krapp@pop.ucr.edu