June Kim & Michelle Cho

Michelle Cho was born in 1992 in the state of Maryland, USA, and is currently studying filmmaking in London, United-Kingdom.
June Kim was born in 1990 in Colorado. She currently lives and works in San Francisco, USA.

The project entitled “Other-on” is a collaboration between Michelle Cho and June Kim, two friends who decided to unite their creativity during their travels to Los Angeles, New Mexico and Spain. The fruit of these two fecund spirits are high angle shots generally featuring anonymous young women, seen from behind, evolving within geometrically surrealistic structures. The warm palette of this series infuses the images with the languor of a long childhood summer, while the erratic composition lines tend to blur the viewer’s spatial bearings.

The peculiarity of the construction is reminiscent of the idiosyncratic way our brain filters reality in our dreams, hence anchoring the series in a psychological scheme. Renowned places such as Ricardo Boffil’s “La Muralla Roja” (The Red Wall) in Spain, become the product of mental architectures; the characters appear as an illustration of the multiple identities within oneself. Duplicated, they wander in vain, desperately seeking a sense of unity. In some other images, one woman is shown alone, also turning her back; while this could express an appeased feeling of harmony, she seems to be distraught ; as though lost within herself. Thus, with this first common project, Cho and Kim have weaved a powerful yet delicate narrative on the struggles of mental balance.