Min Kim Park: Foreign Exchange Winner
©Min Kim Park
Born in South Korea, Min Kim Park explores issues surrounding gender, ethnicity, and identity using performance, video, photography, sound and video installation. Park’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since 2007. Her work has been included at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, Site Santa Fe, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona State University, University of Houston, University of California, Santa Barbara, Emory University, Kinsey Institute, Private Museum in Singapore, Syo gallery in Korea, Korean Cultural Center in Beijing, China. In 2012, Park’s video work, Zummarella was screened at White Box, New York, Columbus International Film and Video Festival, CologneOFF, and Videoholica. Park has been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and the recipient of a Rosenquist artist in residency at North Dakota State University. She received an MFA degree in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 2007 and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University in Chicago. Currently, Park is an assistant professor of photography in the Department of Art and Design at Purdue University.
©Min Kim Park
Women Photography
My work investigates the notion of the millennium feminist artistic practice from the perspective of an Asian Immigrant artist with a journalist background. Consumer and popular culture encroach on the terrain of so-called ‘female freedom,’ appearing supportive of female success yet tying women into new, post-feminist, neurotic dependencies. With a scathing critique of ‘women’s empowerment’ and assuming the role of creator that is also a voyeur and an spectator, my work examines sociocultural phenomena embedded in contemporary women’s lives: from fashion/commercial photography and the reality television ‘make-over’ genre of entertainment to body anxiety and ‘illegible rage.’ Furthermore, my work argues that invidious forms of age re-stabilization are being colored by consumer and popular culture in unprecedented ways, while at the same time examining sociocultural phenomena embedded in contemporary women’s lives: from fashion/commercial photography and reality television make-over genre of entertainment to body anxiety and illegible rage. I continued to examine contradictions and reciprocities between aging, ideal women, art and media culture: engaging as they go in theoretical and critical conversations about contemporary media culture, feminist spectatorship in art and, above all the politics of visual pleasure.
The project, Women Photography, is fueled by an urgent quest to locate freedom amidst objectifying dislocation, forced categorizations, incomplete interpretations, stifling expectations and violent abstraction about women and photography. In addition, my work aims to expose our shared susceptibility to the normative power of media and to warn us about photography’s complicity in such misrepresentation. With this work, she is also exploring photography’s peculiar possibilities and limitations of photography as comprehended medium. She produces the pictures that simultaneously exemplify and expand what were once called pure-photography. Pure photography VS simulacrum of the photography claiming what it wants was the pastiche of the former existence.
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
©Min Kim Park
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](https://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
