“It is the visual codes and conventions within the frame that interest me most.” (K Young)
K Young (they/them) is a lens-based artist living and working in London, UK. A graduate from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, K Young works primarily with collage and a process, which they term re-photography. Using appropriated photographic imagery found in second-hand books and magazines, the artist intervenes on the material, instinctively cutting, splicing and re-joining it, giving rise to a fortuitous collage. The resulting image is then re- photographed and printed, once or several times, as it returns to its original form as a photograph. As the original context is removed, new narratives emerge, materializing K Young’s unconscious thoughts – and unavoidably, their ever-present preconceptions. The queerness of the resulting images mirrors that of the bodies and faces that constitute them. Bodies and faces that are often female, young, models of a conventional beauty assigned to a different time. The rawness of their flesh constricted to the geometry of a floor, a ceiling, a curtain, a chair, a shoe, the geometry of the photograph itself. Subtle and deeply political, K Young deconstructs the images, the norms that govern the subject – a binary representation of the female body – and the object – the framing of that body within the photograph itself.
