Fanfare, 1999
Too often photographs taken to capture late night partying bliss turn out to be a harsh dose of reality the morning after. It is not as easy as it appears, to bring images of night-time revelry into the daylight, without disintegrating the easy mood in which they were taken, but somehow the French-born Korean artist Oan Kim, manages. Using an arsenal of old-fashioned photography techniques, like double exposure and over-exposed blurs, Kim creates large black and white prints of fans – enjoying the show and at the after-party. In Fanfare, 1999, a man’s head is improbably horizontal to a marble table top – nearly touching him is the mouth piece of a well-worn trumpet jutting out between somebody’s legs – and somebody else’s hand is pulling a cigarette from out of the unidentified trumpet players front jean pocket. The number of hands reaching for smokes, clasping knees, and touching strangers; all in this single cramped shot tells the story of the collapsed sense of personal space that we have all experienced late at night (PYO Gallery, Downtown).
