Calvin Kim Participates in Group Show at Subtitled NYC

Visual Arts student Calvin Kim ’23 showed three works at Subtitled NYC’s group show in Brooklyn, NY, Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pic. The show’s title, an ode to the Pink Floyd song bearing the same name on the 1969 album, Ummagumma, served as the anchor for a group show that sought to create an intimate and prismatic space among the works themselves and the visitors who encountered them. 

That song, chock full of bird calls, galloping patterings, and distorted mating calls, lends itself to a perpetually dynamic sonar space. As such, Jaejoon Jang, the show’s curator and the gallery’s founder, took advantage of the gallery’s architecture and arranged the artists’ works from as high up as the pipes and the beams and all the way to the floor. In the case of one of Kim’s pieces, a poem entitled “Dreamers,” Jang asked that Kim inscribe the piece onto the wall in pencil lead. 

Besides creating a dynamic visual space, Jang’s curatorial choices created opportunities for nuanced interactions with the artworks as works within themselves and as works within an inter-relational landscape. For Kim’s works, which explore stages of growth and decay, time, and memory, viewers could slow down and peek into the nooks, crannies, and minute details within pieces such as Waiting Tree, (ceramics and chain, 2022) or Gathering of dreamers in repose before the rain, (ceramic, twigs, fruit shells, cigarettes, and iridescent paint, 2022). 

The curious and willing viewer was subtly invited to consider one of the relational aspects that Kim grapples with in his work—namely, that “the enormity of the world is always in relation to the small things that we can name and maintain and things that need protection.”  

Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pic was on view from December 16, 2022 to January 29, 2023.

Calvin Kim ’23 is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages questions of time and memory as they persist within the layers of natural and man made materials. He received a joint B.F.A. and B.A. in Psychology at Cornell University, and was a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship. Recently, Kim’s works were featured in issue 151 of New American Painting, and are forthcoming in issue 165 of the critically renowned  magazine.