Woojae Kim & Christopher Baliwas when the sun was just behind the horizon, the air turned blue

Working within the unique architectural constraints of a window display space, Kim and Baliwas's exhibition reflects on the current moment where we spend our days in concealment fighting against a barely visible threat. Their work examines the “still life” (both as a genre and a phrase) and the framework of the “camera obscura” to play with the transparent divide between stillness and growth, life and death.

Large sheets of paper from medical exam tables are adhered to the windows with baby oil illuminated by a cast of cool blue light. Viewing the exhibition inside the windows requires peeking through holes (made possible by cutouts of text on the paper) whereby a range of materials are visible, including photographs illuminated by germicidal light, planters with barley and mugwort sprouting under grow-lights, jars of fermented strawberries, a mound of soil, and a video projecting toward the window.

Kim and Baliwas’s installation contains obscure, poetic, and personal references of their own experiences throughout the pandemic. Like many of us, they have experienced moments of growth and loss that we may not be entirely aware of; however, we intuit them during our brief moments of passing in the overly sterilized and perilous spaces that we inhabit together. It is as though the exhibition says "despite the stillness of life, there is still life.”

Christopher Baliwas is a Filipino American interdisciplinary artist born in the Bay Area and based in Los Angeles. He is the eldest son of Jackie and Thor Baliwas, and a new father. With the practice of photography as a homeplace for him, it is often taken over by mediums of sound, sculpture, or writing. Baliwas’s work seeks for an inversion of perception through the camera obscura, the unspectacular, the rudimentary, and stories of family as an attempt to question time, site(sight), and ownership. Under the alias, reallynathan, Baliwas independently released the album “O” in 2020, which has served as a portal to develop his own(?) relationship to the concept of “All Time”.

Woojae Kim combines his research on biology with somatic experiences. He is currently making Makgeolli to learn about microbiology, and the histories and relationships between living creatures and the land. Through words used in both scientific and cultural discussions, such as “colonization”, “culture”, and “diversity”, he observes how we relate to each other and to non-human others. Kim is a master of fine arts candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He lives in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations.