By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Search the images of family vacation on the internet and you will be blinded by the sun and smiles. Quite the contrast to the gray of an Ohio winter.
Digital artist Kim Young of Bowling Green has taken some of those images and altered their digital DNA to create fresh abstract images.
Those images will be part of the exhibit Virtual Vacation at the Neon Heater Art Gallery in Findlay. The show includes Young ‘s digital prints and installations by video artists Laura Post and Richard Munaba. The show opens with a reception Thursday, Jan.5, from 5 to 8 p.m. and continues in the gallery on the second floor of the Jones Building, 400½ S. Main St. Findlay, through Jan. 13.
Young’s digital prints depict inviting scenes of vacation sport including Disneyland, as viewers have never seen them before. She has subverted the scenes of beaches, mountains and Mickey Mouse by digging deep into their digital codes. Her prints provide a vacation as much from the clichéd images of vacation as from the Ohio winter.
Young, who teaches in the Bowling Green State University School of Art, said: “I’m really interested with how computers and images, and humans and images, are interacting. There’s more images to interact with than at any point in human history, so people get kind of numb to the whole idea of images. I’m a visual artist. What does that mean to someone who makes digital images and wants people took at them? I don’t want my things to look like something people have seen a 100 million times before.”
All those images that pop up on our various screens, are not really images, Young said. “They’re code.”
So she started to dig into the code itself. The string of seemingly indecipherable numbers. She messed with it. Introduced glitches. She took colored pencils and wrote out the string of characters for JPG images. “I had never seen most of these characters. It was very meditative. It got me thinking about how computers recognize images compared to how humans do. I kind of nerded out on that.”
For the work that will displayed in Virtual Vacation, she did searches for vacation photos. She took stock images, and then altered the code, but not so much that the computer didn’t still recognize the image.
The result was abstract patterns, swirls of color, lines that look like they rise above the surface of the paper. Is that a shadow-like image of Mickey Mouse’s ears dominating the corner of one print?
The images display the same internal coherence of the best abstract art.
Young wanted them printed out either on paper or acetate, to give them physical form. The images displayed just on a screen “leave me cold.”
She first exhibited work using this technique about a year ago in a show in the Toledo Museum of Art’s Community Gallery. Those pieces will be included in the Neon Heater exhibit as well.
The Neon Heater was opened in 2012 by Ian Breidenbach in “the least likely space” for a gallery, Young said. “He is really devoted to having a space where he can show challenging contemporary art, primarily installation art.”
He issues open calls for artists, and assembles the exhibitions from that. Young is joined by Munaba, from Baltimore, and Post, from Cincinnati. Young was unfamiliar with their work until they got involved in this show.
Young brings a long career in graphic design and multimedia experience to the table.
She grew up in Bowling Green and graduated with a degree in art education from Bowling Green State University. But when she graduated she realized she didn’t want to teach – “I loved teaching, but didn’t like schools.” She also didn’t want to work in graphic design – she has a tremor which made hand drawing a challenge, nor computers. Still she liked programming and design. It wasn’t long before “technology caught up with my deficits.”
She ended up freelancing, then doing multimedia work for Boeing’s training before returning to Bowling Green where she first worked at what was then MidAm Bank. She worked in graphic design for BGSU for 10 years. She also met her husband, Ian Young, here at a philosophy department party.
Though she loved the creative side of graphic design, she was growing bored. At another party, she spoke with art professor Bonnie Mitchell who suggested she take some graduate courses. Young loved it and decided to pursue a Master’s of Fine Arts degree.
Then in 2012 – the year she turned 50 – she received that MFA and was laid off. She was hired as an adjunct instructor in the School of Art to fill in for a faculty member on leave, and then continued in the same capacity the next year. Then she was hired.
The change Young has experienced over her career helps guide her teaching. The creativity is a constant, but “the technology will change vastly.”
“You can’t even imagine what it’ll be, or maybe they can,” she said of her students. “They’re the ones who will be developing it.”
