middle image, installation view at Fellow of Contemporary Art Gallery, 2009, curated by Aandrea Stang & Zacara Kaplan

Kyungmi Shin and Todd Gray, The Promise of Altered States on West Blvd between Slauson and Florence, 2009    

When we invited Todd Gray and Kyungmi Shin to collaborate, we were most interested in how their backgrounds (Gray, born and raised in Los Angeles; Shin, born in Korea and immigrating to the city in 1983) would inform their estimations of Los Angeles. In the end, they opted to address their own neighborhood, the life and practices they've formed together. The pair each took their cameras and headed out to shoot the community with the sole boundary being to maintain focus on the 15-block patch of retail and housing along West Boulevard between Florence and Slauson nearest to their home and studio.          

Formally, their work borrows heavily from both Shin's recent collages involving stacked architectural forms and some of Gray's hybrid music/video performances particularly in a jump-cut imagery and pulsing coloration. Mimicking the stacking of architectural forms found in Shin's collages allows a linearity to emerge inviting the viewer to draw connections between the signs, graffiti tags, store fronts, billboards, and homes. What Gray and Shin realized after themselves re-exploring their neighborhood was a predominance of churches, liquor stores, convalescent homes, and artist studios. At first a seemingly disparate bunch with both positive and negative characteristics, Shin and Gray soon tied the spaces together through their conduciveness to expression and permissiveness of escape and transformation. The coloration mirrors their reading. Deep browns in a mural segue into bright yellows structures into rich red lettering on billboards into final punctuations of strikingly blue skies that reappear throughout a number of the photographs. After a more careful look at the composition, the viewer can even trace a pattern of jutting diagonals that like the churches, liquor stores, studios and homes themselves, that can reproduce the disorienting feeling of an altered state.     

Perhaps the most compelling element of  Shin and Gray's collage, however, and its most clear connection to the ethos of Not Los Angeles, is a certain poignancy stemming from the artists' clear affection for the locations. This work, unlike the many architectural photo-histories of the city, allows for a fond portrait of the socio-architecture of Los Angeles.