Photography Atelier

Kymberli Ghee

 No Trespassing

The mountains of West Virginia are wildly beautiful with remote unincorporated towns that hold not only ethereal nature and private people, but also family secrets, strange occurrences, ghosts, unsolved mysteries and local superstitions. It is also where my family is from.

As a child in the ’70’s and ’80’s, we lived in DC but visited my grandparents in West Virginia often, sometimes staying the entire summer. My siblings and I explored the woods and followed creek streams and railroad tracks looking for ghosts and the supernatural. I was an inquisitive kid who also enjoyed eavesdropping on visitors that sat around my grandmother’s
kitchen table gossiping, until I was noticed and chased away. I heard talk about a farm witch, a ghost hunter, and a mechanic my mother might have been cheating on my father with. I persuaded my siblings to climb over fences with No Trespassing signs to spy on the people being gossiped about. It was a childhood of mischief and exploration, secrets and intrigue.

After my grandparents passed away when I was fifteen, I didn’t visit anymore. City life in California lured me away and it was there I learned some people make fun of West Virginia. As an awkward, shy teen, I felt embarrassed and didn’t want to be called a hick.

Decades passed until fate mandated my return to West Virginia. The moment I stepped out of the airplane I felt a nostalgia bomb of comforting familiarity. It looked the same, wildly rural, but the people I was fascinated with were gone. Their homes were still there, although many sat abandoned and empty. I became obsessed with the old structures, the land, the people that once lived there. Again, I ignored No Trespassing signs and searched for clues. I found my own ghosts and the memories that were evoked about this place, the people and about me.

“No Trespassing” is a non linear portrait of my childhood and birthplace. Using diptychs, pinhole photography, collages and surrogates, I explore how memory and land are intertwined and triggering, and the manner in which things are remembered, sometimes as faint fragments, sometimes vivid and clear. I uncover that I have powerful bonds to the roots of my origin despite my absence. I embrace my identity with intrigue for the past and the now. As this body of work progressed, it evolved in to a love letter to West Virginia and my heritage.

Artist Bio

Kym Ghee is an award winning Los Angeles based artist whose photography explores internal and external landscapes. Ghee utilizes multiple approaches from self portraiture to documentary to examine the psychological aspects of her interior world and the mysterious and intangible in the exterior world from the everyday to the institutional.

Kym Ghee received a BFA from the University of California, San Diego with a focus on visual arts, photography and writing. She has been selected to exhibit her work in multiple national juried exhibitions and has shown at institutions including Center for Photography at Woodstock and Los Angeles Center for Photography, and as well as galleries in Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta and Palm Springs. Her photographs have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Sensitive Skin, and Pool Magazine Las Vegas.