DisCerning Eye Review: Gray Eminence by Mark Jenkins

Soomin Ham, “East and West” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

WITH HER KNACK FOR PHOTOGRAPHING THE UNSEEABLE, Soomin Ham can convey a sense of absence -- often, though not always, involving her family history. The artist’s current Multiple Exposures show ponders a different sort of loss. The South Korea-born local photographer’s “In Gray” illustrates her own displaced identity. Traveling between two homelands, she found herself “an outsider in both worlds,” according to her statement.

Ham expresses this alienation partly with two groups of diptychs, pictorially linked or flipped; one part is overlaid with white acrylic paint and the other with black Korean ink. Each of the paired images is difficult to discern, but in different ways. Another set of related pictures depicts a forest, printed either very darkly or very lightly, and with narrow insets in the opposite scheme fitted into the larger composition. Ham calls these punctuated photos the “Window series.” Again, the act of looking becomes an effort, not something that can be done without thought.

A view outside through an actual window is included in the “Revisited series,” but most of these pictures depict trees or their parts -- branches, stumps, or a single “Last Leaf,” soft as if already fading into memory. Trees “are metaphors for myself -- physically rooted in the land, yet continually changing with the world around them, “ Ham writes.

Since some of the subjects are “revisited,” they probably are things or places Ham has observed before. But their significance isn’t evident to the spectator. In fact, what the artist photographs seems less important than what happens to the images later. They may be printed on Korean hanji paper -- another token of Ham’s origins -- or layered with ink, paint, or wax. Since the pictures are all black-and-white, the results are visually stark. Yet their surfaces can be lushly hand-worked, transforming the photos from mechanical representations into personal totems. The outsider in both worlds crafts little worlds of her own.