In what follows, I want to explore the question of how implicated the personal and the public are through family photography, as both seek to construct, reconstruct, and invent histories lived against the ephemera of time and place. The family as nation and the nation as family were visually inextricable in that room, where the fan whirred all day against the humid, tropical heat. Opposite, there were two other family stories on display, images cut out from newspapers or magazines and framed, those of King George VI and Queen Mary, together with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret atop their ponies and of Pandit Nehru with his daughter Indira. The story of three generations told through milestones unfolded before our eyes. On one, there was the family, our family, the various momentous events of sons and daughters, graduations, weddings, and births. The living room of my grandparents’ home had two walls adorned with photographs, one facing the other. Hours are 9 am to 4 pm, Monday throughThursday, during the academic year, closed during breaks.
Lane Community College Art Galleries are on the main campus at 4000 E. Kum Ja Lee will give a gallery talk at 1 pm Thursday, March 2. It’s meant to be a prayer, Kim says, as in wishing for COVID to be over. It has a central abstract design that represents hands clasped, as if in prayer. “Through the Bars” is a colorful fiber work that hangs on the wall and is highly sculptural. Afterward, she went back in and took some control over the subject matter, picking out shapes she saw in the drips and emphasizing patterns that appealed to her.Īll the art in this exhibit was made over the past seven years.
Being in a down mood, Lee says she threw the materials at the canvas and let them drip.
PHOTO SENSE OF TIME AND PLACE SERIES
“Passage of Time III” is a series of canvases created with dye powder, graphite and acrylic paint. Images in the show that are restricted to gray tones seem to correspond to times of sadness or loss. The effect of painting is created by an ironing process, pressing down hard to combine layers of colored felt. The patterns Fender and Miller appreciate were created by a technique she invented. They like the patterns within the larger shapes found in “Nostalgia,” which is a work of art labeled as a “felt painting.” Actually, there is no paint in the work, Lee explains. Jamieson Fender and Grace Miller are among the students at the Feb. But they all have one thing in common, which is the artist’s fascination with the concept of time how it exists yet is invisible, and how it may cause something to fade and disappear or, conversely, to grow and become more complicated. Made of spray paint or fiber, graphite or oil paint, the pieces vary greatly in both medium and style. The adjoining second gallery shows other of her works hung on the wall in more traditional fashion. Going to that spot, you almost feel as if you are part of the art. Lee looks down at a line that’s been marked on the floor, and takes a step beyond. “How far can you go into the room?” I ask. The overall effect of the fiber installation is of a rainbow grid drawn through space. Her husband helped the last time she made a similar piece, which was for her master of fine arts thesis at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. But like a lot of other college students, he came home during the pandemic, and so he was here to help her build Perception of Time and Space. Her son is not an artist he studied biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. These are two elements that characterize Eastern perceptions of time, Lee explains in her artist’s statement. In this way, the installation was “improvised.” The colors of yarn were chosen as she went, and so were their positions.
Her installation is made of different types of fiber - cotton, rayon, acrylic - whose threads are strung across the space of one of the two galleries in LCC’s Art Building, # 11.
A challenge she gives herself as an artist, then, is to translate the motion of time into a single image. It passes but you can’t feel it or see it - not in the moment. She speaks and her son translates when necessary. I ask about the inspiration for her installation piece, a beautiful and ephemeral room-sized sculpture that has the same title as the exhibit. Her son Kevin Kim, who grew up in Eugene, is with her. She is from South Korea and has lived in Eugene since 1999. I meet artist Kum Ja Lee at the opening of her exhibit Perception of Time and Space, which is on display until March 16 at Lane Community College.
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