Kate Gordon

Kate Gordon
Lafayette, Louisiana, USA

STATEMENT

I consider myself a visual storyteller steeped in the language of painting. However, my stories are neither rational nor linear, their beginnings are unpacked from dreams; giving me a glimmer of the creature that culture has created. Inventing imagery without an observable source involves countless iterations, each one compressing the one before it. For this reason, collage is the most agile tool at my disposal. Carving up watercolor drawings for the sole purpose of stitching the everyday and the absurd together. This duplication, fragmentation, and instability directly relate to the precarious political and social environment society inhabits today; forced to navigate the world through a lens mediated by technology and overwhelmed with a surplus of information with little hierarchical structure.
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My most recent body of work is investigating the following: Contraction, as a force and in the context of childbirth, shortens and tightens, creating immense pressure and a form of unavoidable chaos, which allows for both an ending and a beginning within the cycle of life. This body of work will examine the concept of contraction as it relates to the changes happening in the environment through climate change and how this is reflected through the nature and progression of pregnancy.

BIO

In a world where reality is a layered event, Kate Gordon’s drawings seek to build illusions that challenge our perception of what is real and what is imagined. For Gordon, the painted picture plane is a three-dimensional installation inlaid with video and, at moments, burgeoning on becoming a pop-up book. The ranging material facts of her work are in keeping with the notion that the dream imagery she mines is not rational and does not prescribe purely to naturalistic sensibilities. Her vision is a translation of the utter strangeness of the world.

Kate Gordon currently holds the position of Assistant Professor Figure Drawing & Foundations at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She earned an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute. Gordon has shown her paintings, collages, and video works nationally; exhibitions include a solo show at the Hilliard Art Museum, curation into the Weatherspoon Art Museum’s Art on Paper exhibition, an invitation to create a public video installation at Block 2—a visual platform for new media artists in Raleigh, NC, and a solo exhibition at The Carrack, an artist-run project space, in Durham, NC. Most recent professional accomplishments include participating in Kolaj Institute’s Artist Residency in Scotland, curation into the Contemporary Drawing exhibition at UNC Asheville, and inclusion in Le Mieux Galleries maximalist group show “Is This Too Much?”

ARTIST CONTACT

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