Kim Schoen : Calibbration at Die Plek, California.

Pamplemousse, 2022 13,1875 x 19,875 inches, LightJet Print- Kim Schoen

Calibbration is a new body of work by Los Angeles based artist Kim Schoen. The exhibition, which takes its name from an image-to-text artifact—when large-scale diffusion meets zero comprehension—presents two interlocking series.

The first is a photographic series of still lives. The subjects are book blanks—empty volumes manufactured by the Moser factory, a facility located near the Black Forest in Germany. Starting in 1966, after being a book bindery for several generations, the company started producing decorative and prop volume blank books. Under the solemn hum of industrial machinery, books are made that will never be read. These are not blank books in the common sense. They bear titles. They possess spines, covers, and the full architectural dignity of literature. They are, to all outward appearances, books. And yet they contain nothing. No sentences. No paragraphs. No footnotes that trail off into speculation. They are perfect vessels for ideas. The practice of the book blank has precedent: Walter Benjamin, in an unpublished 1931 correspondence with Hannah Arendt, described his own fantasy of a library composed entirely of unwritten books as "the only honest library, which does not pretend to have resolved what remains open."  

The second part consists of press proofs printed in Liquid Electrophotography (LEP), a digital printing technology developed by HP Indigo. Schoen fed Thomas Moser's invented titles into an AI image-generating system, asking it to picture what these non-existent books might contain. The machine obliged with full confidence. Schoen began this strange dialogue, refining the images into something that approximated her own desires, curious about images generated by text for books that contain none. 

Discover move at Die Plek’s website.

Installation shots at Die Plek, Photos by Brica Wilcox

Kim Schoen (b. 1969, Princeton) is an artist working with photography, video installation, and writing based in Los Angeles, California. Her multi-disciplinary practice explores the subject of rhetoric in language and image. Schoen often uses commercial representations as her raw materials, mining their structures to expose their absurdities, irrationalities, and latent poetics.