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Inside Lucy Kim’s “Skin Might See” debut at Mahoney Hall

(Photo Courtesy of Kyra Barry) “Lucy Kim standing in front of one of the works in her show, ‘Over, Under, Around, and Through’.”

Kyra Barry
Connector Editor

Lucy Kim has little interest in the mundane and traditional in her works. During her January 2022 artist talk at UMass Lowell, she shared her fascination with the mediums she works with through her works, pushing and experimenting, and for her it is the journey that matters most.

The University Gallery at Mahoney Hall regularly cycles through exhibits that are free and open to the public, displaying works made by artists from all over, with diverse mediums. Last semester, artist Pedro Letria exhibited photographs and a film that comprised his show, “Maskirovka.” This semester, until March 5, artist Lucy Kim, associate professor of art at Boston University and winner of numerous art accolades, including most recently a 2022 Creative Capital Award, will exhibit her show “Skin Might See” at UMass Lowell, which includes works with a variety of often unconventional mediums and works that will be displayed for the first time in a gallery.

At the start of her artist talk, a type of event where guest artists for the gallery get to contextualize their work, Kim took the audience through the evolution of her art from college to the present exhibit. Kim’s artistic inspiration for sculptural pieces began with foil rubbings. “It’s like something clicked, where all these things came together,” Kim said of the process, expressing that at the time she had been sick of all the mental energy required to go into a traditional painting, from color picking to composition planning. Foil rubbings and subsequently sculptures made from foil rubbings gave the artist catharsis and a satisfaction that had been eluding her. “I couldn’t see what I was rubbing until I rubbed it.”

She liked that foil was only one color and said that she resisted the advice of a professor who suggested she paint her foil sculptures, until she graduated college and began painting her foil sculptures. This led to the next part of her artistic journey, where she attempted to create a foil sculpture deliberately representing a human figure. When it came out looking like a flat and lifeless plastic doll, falling into the uncanny valley, Kim flattened it, returning life to the piece. All the shadows painted onto the piece and hidden by shadows actually cast by the sculpture were displayed, and Kim said it was more naturalistic, even if flat in a way no human would be.

Her journey took her from foil to plaster molds, which could more efficiently take in the shape of the object Kim wished to represent, if only to flatten them out more easily. Kim still uses molds regularly in her works. Most pieces end up flattened, although of her mother’s mold, Kim said she took effort to flatten it attractively, or at least less ugly than other molds, keeping in mind her mother’s efforts to be presentable.

Candid, Kim said, “Art is a lie, c’mon, ” and shared that the process through which she created her pieces didn’t always have intentionality in mind. It was like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck, or in her case rolling foil over a surface to see what appeared on the skin.

The works she has currently displayed at the University Gallery are not easy to comprehend. From her series Kim’s Knife Paintings, knife molds create a canvas for competing objects, juxtaposing the three-dimensional canvas with the two-dimensional painting. Her skills as an illusionist painter are on display in the art, which initially obfuscates the knife molding it is painted on and the meanings of the pieces.

Discussing how people consume art, Kim said, “Our…impulse to create a rational symbolic world in whatever we’re looking at so…when you look at this but you don’t at first realize it’s nice, that comes later. But you try to understand why is there a thumb in a circle and another circle, another circle?”

In addition to the art molded from knives, there is a series of non-traditional pieces representing the artist on display, aptly titled “Auto-Synthetic”. They are not self-portraits—instead, following the artist’s method of casting objects, in this case herself, in plaster and flattening the resulting molds. Each of the works in her “Auto-Synthetic” series are painted with unique images overlaying the flattened molds and different types of paint to elicit the effect of the same person as distorted and different from piece to piece.

There is a clear tactile fascination with most of her work and even acknowledged as in interest by the artist. Despite the name of the exhibit, viewers are strongly discouraged from touching the pieces. Visitors to the gallery should see with their eyes, not their skin.

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