place where, before, In A In
A Solo exhibition by Kim Zumpfe
In collaboration with Bacabaya
JANUARY 19 – MARCH 9, 2019
Opening Reception
and performance
January 19, 2018
6 – 9 PM
place where, before, In A In is an installation and performance rooted in potentials of the still life: fruit, products and waste, leftovers, queer shapes and sounds situated in relationship to the ownership of materials and land. Visual boundaries, such as fences and buildings, create divides in experience that often impact people’s sense of belonging, commonality, place, and behavior within shared geographies. These forms of still life that overlap between the American exotic and mundane provide an alternate experience with materials that are understood in limited ways through use and consumption.
Do we dream in the same light?
A video of the moon viewed behind a window screen captures the anonymity of a viewer and traces of a domestic space. The sense of a missing individual behind the camera points to an interior life determined by constraints from the architecture of a home. A still life. This is a distancing of the personal—not drained of meaning but infused with a relative isolation by the effects of physical, social, and psychological spatial divisions. A still life provides an experience of place where the coherence of social hierarchies can be clarified and expanded, a challenge to the cultural desire of freedom and individuation, and a look into disempowering forces of isolation.
About the artists
Kim Zumpfe is an artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. Through individual and collaborative work, the built environment is resituated as a way to address the deep entwinement between materials, space, and sociality as models of relations. Primarily working in installation, she considers how space produces encounters that can collapse identity, intimacy, and systems of influence. Zumpfe works to create alternate possibilities in the order of things through working with architectures that engage with space as a psychology and qualities of bent time(s).
Zumpfe’s work has been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), CSUF Grand Central Art Center, Audain Gallery Vancouver, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Diverseworks Houston, Hammer Museum, Human Resources Los Angeles, Los Angeles Contemporary Archives (LACA), UCR Culver Center for the Arts Riverside, and several public and online sites.
Bacabaya is an artist and musician reflecting on the Persian diaspora, spiritual oppression, intergenerational experience, and vulnerability. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, TIFF Lightbox, Media City Film Festival, the Echo Park Film Center, and etc.