Amy Yeminne Kim
I am an artist working in photography and installation. Before my long stay as a Texas resident, I grew up in South Koera during the height of often violent democratic protests. I am interested in modern day geopolitics through the lens of the oil extraction craze in West Texas. My work is informed by photo history and theory, the promises and failures of the photographic medium, and my shifting identities as a Korean and as an American. 2025 PH Museum Grant 3rd place. Author and artist of “Basin Recipe Cards,” Nourish and Resist, Yale Univ. Press. 2024.
ABOUT
Instagram
Wolfcamp Catalogue
The Permian Basin stretches across 86,000 square miles of desert in west Texas and eastern New Mexico. Far below this vast emptiness lies the site of my ongoing photographic project—the Wolfcamp Shale—the world’s most lucrative oil producing formation. With an anthropological eye, my project brings into focus the rise of the American nationalism, the colonial history of oil extraction, deal-makings, labor relations, post-colonial ripples, and the prehistoric geology of the carbon bearing Wolfcamp Shale. My square box frames, taking photographs every three miles across U.S. Interstate I-20, and the utilization of playwriting, are examples of the structuralist approach I use to reshape this unflinching universe, conspicuously imperial as it is vulnerably human.
Link to exhibition catalogue and essay here.