LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE, CA.- For almost a year, interdisciplinary artist Carole Kim has been working in Descanso Gardens as its first artist-in-residence. The results of her work are on display in a new exhibition at the Sturt Haaga Gallery called Shine a Light from July 15 – October 27, 2019.

The exhibition includes a diverse array of work including digital metal prints, micro video projections, window treatments and a multimedia installation in the larger gallery. Over the course of the exhibition, she will present site-specific installations in different locations within the Gardens, featuring video projection onto landscape, live music and dance.

“I’ve devoted the last 20 years to pulling the moving image off the cinematic screen and having it take on spatial and sculptural form,” said Kim. “In my more recent work, I have turned directly to nature and landscape as a canvas for video projection. My residency at Descanso is a direct extension of this area of research. I could not have asked for a more perfect fit for a laboratory for my work at present.”

Kim originally began her first projects involving landscape as a canvas for video projection in people’s backyards and in Joshua Tree National Park. In 2017, she returned from a residency in Norway where she worked with projections in the forest in the middle of the night. There, she had developed a deeper conviction that she was tapping into something significant and forwarded a sampling of images on to Descanso Gardens executive director, Juliann Rooke. Together with Gallery Director, Cristeen Martinez, they discussed how it would be possible for her to continue this exploration at Descanso as artist-in-residence.

“Working with Carole has been a great experience,” said Martinez. “She has not only developed a unique exhibition but helped us envision a future artist-in-residence program for Descanso Gardens. I’m so excited about the possibility of sharing this insider view of the creative process with guests of Descanso.”

“What fascinates me about this body of work is the merging of the complexity of landscape with the illusionistic world of the moving image,” continued Kim. “It’s highly unpredictable what combination will yield something interesting. Physics ultimately has its own agenda that I must work with. I love how a new composite world unfolds and I am left to contemplate, ‘What is this new world I am looking at?’ Adding live dancers to the mix furthers this interaction as they can observe how their bodies are being mapped onto the trees and appear to be existing in another realm. This will be explored in the live performances.”

She added, “Another body of work that I have been developing has been rooted in photography. I have been shooting the Gardens with macro, wide angle and infrared lenses and creating libraries of fragments of photos of the changing colors, forms and textures of the Gardens. I then spatially rearrange these fragments producing composite images that are painterly yet retain the textures from the Gardens and the mathematical underlying structure of their arrangement. Mixed scale fragments recombine to create an entirely other kind of landscape – another way in which analog meets digital in a commingled space.”