Art Review: Soo Kim at Angles Gallery

Soo Kim proceeds with her longstanding excavation of the photographic image in Midday Moon, her second solo exhibition with Angles Gallery.

Her subject in this case is the urban environment. Each piece begins with a photograph, taken by Kim, of a dense, jumbled front of architectural planes—walls, windows, and signs—which she selectively extracts with an x-acto blade to produce a physically fragile, geographically indeterminate skeleton that is then layered over other similarly extracted images.

The result is a confusing mélange of line, shape, and spatial perspective that gradually comes to entangle the eye, much as the sensory onslaught of the city comes to entangle the psyche. While not as elegant as past work involving trees and other natural environments, the cityscapes have a buzzing presence that is its own appeal.

The highlight of the show, however, is a project that explores a very different milieu, one that falls somewhere between nature and the city: the desert community of Arcosante, founded in the 1970s by the architect Paolo Soleri in an effort to balance the cultural life of an urban environment with ecological sustainability.

Titled In Light of the Moment, the work is not a print but a book, assembled from 25 hand-cut prints. Lying open on a table, the book’s stacked pages have a sculptural dimension far more complex than that of the flat prints, one that points in a potentially exciting direction.

—Holly Myers

Angles Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 396-5019, through December 22. Closed Sunday and Monday. anglesgallery.com