Hei Park: Now & Then
October 7-29, 2022
Hei Park: Now & Then
Opening reception: Friday, October 7, 5:00-9:00 PM
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
This exhibition features random portraitures of several ongoing series, such as Many Faces, Our Waking Souls and Dream Series. In addition, it displays images from a documentary of Cycle of Life by Richard Jolley, which reveal the behind-the-scenes process of making massive glasswork over five years.
America is my adopted home. It is a home where I am alone; I have no relatives. Making photographs of people provides me an opportunity to reach out to establish connections with strangers—maybe even relationships—based not on inherited genetics but rather on trust. Photographic portraiture is my passion. A successful portrait induces an involvement—much in the same way that connections with another in life can lead to commitment of interest and concern. My current work is on exploration of the possibilities of creating prolonged vision by placing the posing figure against a rear projected image with the hope of creating a correlative combination. My hope is for a result that falls somewhere on a spectrum between credible narrative and impressionistic fantasy.
Hei Park was born in Inchon, South Korea. She was educated at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, where she earned a B.A. in Piano and an M.A. in Music Education. In 1976, she moved to the United States with her family. While living in Knoxville, Park earned an A.S. in Communications Graphics Technology from Pellissippi State and worked for several years at the Scripps Network’s Home and Garden Television production facility as a freelance graphic designer. She studied with the University of Tennessee photography professor Baldwin Lee and has had multiple photography solo shows, including one in Korea and Nashville. She has also contributed photographs to numerous group exhibitions. Currently, she is studying time-based art at the University of Tennessee. Her works have been shown in Handheld UTK and a traveling exhibition, Light of the Truth, in 2022.