Decoys
Kim Westfall
7.22 — 9.9
Gallery A
This body of work is from the perspective of humans.
The past few years, I have been interested in focusing on nature and the sublime. Particularly the violence of nature and sublimity which often gets overlooked in favor of beauty.
I am attracted to the concept of decoys because of their implied violence. They deceive birds so hunters can shoot them. I also like that they are an American folk craft similar to rug tufting. I see a strong parallel here to American identity in terms of mundane violence, deceptive appearances and messaging, and a distorted relationship to simulacra.
At the same time, I am interested in expanding the technical application of rug tufting, inspired by the écriture works of Korean painter Park Seo-bo. I took the Hanja relief stripes of Park’s works and reworked them as tufted lines reminiscent of chenille fabrics. This also recalls Agnes Martin’s paintings and her interpretations of Zen clarity through meditative repetition.
I wanted to extract the figure from my work, and relate more to nature and objects. Transposing the decoy onto modernist serial repetition felt like the first step in this process.
Kim Westfall (b. 1986; Seoul, Korea) lives and works in New York City. Westfall’s practice focuses on American and Korean identities from oblique, unconventional angles that question how identity acts as a node within larger systems of nationality, history, and nature. In Decoys, painted sculptures of birds used in hunting are depicted in moments of stillness. Taking cues from American folk crafts and the Korean painter Park Seo-bo, Westfall’s textiles integrate the history of modernist repetition; painted lines are transposed onto tufted fiber. Westfall earned her BFA in 2008 from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited internationally and held solo shows at Thierry Goldberg in New York and Big Medium in Austin, TX (2014). She was awarded a travel grant through the Jerome Foundation in 2017 to research her personal history and the legacy of her adoption agency, Holt International. Westfall’s first exhibition at No Place, Chibi USA, followed in 2018, and she was designated a GKS scholar that fall. Westfall pursued language and painting studies in South Korea from 2019 to 2020. More recent exhibitions include Splendid Bitch at White Columns in New York (2020) and a public art project on the Hudson titled As An Angle-American in 2021. This is Westfall’s second exhibition at No Place Gallery. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show with Gaa Gallery in Provincetown, MA, in early August 2022.