Poignant Pics no. 85: On Kym Ghee's "No Trespassing"
“Highly creative people have a gift for connecting supposedly unrelated elements and ideas. They cross borders without regard for customs posts or No Trespassing signs. They throw suspension bridges across great distances. These elegant and unexpected combinations flow together beautifully in the twilight zone, where metaphor and resemblance rules in place of logic and classification.”
I was scrolling FB when this image by Kymberli Ghee appeared. I found it fascinating.
Partly because I love diptychs or triptychs—I love the "interesting conversations" that happen when disparate-seeming images are skillfully forced to hold space together.
I immediately connected with the image despite its location in Appalachia because of the type of landscape. I grew up in a then-rural town in Massachusetts, and though the area is now well developed and spreads much further out, at the time, my neighborhood was at the "edge of civilization", surrounded by large tracts of undeveloped land. This open yard backing up to a residence at the edge of the woods reminds me of my childhood, filled with those seemingly endless spaces where we could roam until dusk when mothers would expect us home. It also reminded me of a type of freedom that most children today will never have, which is a nostalgic feeling for me. Yet there is also a sense of this being an area where poverty reigns because it's a trailer home that appears far from the madding crowd. So before I have even gotten to the right side of the diptych, Ghee has my mind in battle with itself.
And on the right side, the man. He looks somewhat young, a little dangerous, and his expression is not welcoming. He's in a bathtub, one of our few places of solitude, but someone stuck a camera in his face. Indeed, that "No trespassing" title can speak to more than the landscape: it emanates from how he returns the viewer's gaze.
Trying to fit together nostalgic memories, stereotypes of place, and a slightly dangerous-looking male in a bathtub requires some effort. I am still figuring out the puzzle Ghee laid before me. You may interpret it differently or fit together the pieces I haven't gotten to join yet. But that conversation with no closure has kept me returning time and again to this image, scrutinizing it for clues.
Ghee told me, "No Trespassing is an image that strives to show what I feel in rural West Virginia. Not satisfied to show what it looks like, I create how it might resonate if you were with me, taking in the energy of a wildly rural place and people who don't want you to trespass on their property."
No Trespassing is the first image from a new series still in process. I glimpsed a second image during a workshop we both participated in; it was equally intriguing. I await the rest of the series with bated breath. Bravo, Kym!
Artist Bio
Kymberli Ghee (Kym Ghee) is an award winning Los Angeles based photographer.
Working primarily with landscapes and portraits, her recent and in-progress body of work recreates memories and fragments of lives and the land in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia where she was born.
Instagram. kym_ghee@instagram.com
Author Bio
Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.