KATY STONE: Vital Fluid
November 14, 2005 – January 13, 2006
Curated by Homeira Goldstein, Chairman of the Board of ARTS Manhattan, this solo Exhibition spotlights Katy Stone, a Seattle, Washington Based emerging artist.
Originally from Iowa, Katy Stone received her M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Washington in 1994. Her work, an intriguing coalescence of drawing, painting and sculpture, has been exhibited at venues both nationally and internationally. In the past two years, she has celebrated a number of debuts including her first solo show in New York, site-specific installations at the Boise Art Museum in Boise, Idaho and Suyama Space, an alternative exhibition space in Seattle, with inclusions in Art Basel, Art Cologne and the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea. Featured in an upcoming article in Sculpture Magazine, and in a number of recent group shows including “Earthly Delights,” at MASS Art in Boston, “Landscape: Theme and Variations,” at the Schneider Museum in Ashland, Oregon, and “Resurfaced,” at Boston University, she continues to attract attention for her innovative use of materials and construction methods. She serves an Assistant Professor in the School of Digital Arts at Henry Cogswell College in Everett, Washington.
Katy sees her work as a combination of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Beginning with the accumulation of painted marks on transparent mylar; she cuts out and layers these elements into objects of greatly varied scale. Pinning the works directly to the wall, placing them on the floor, or suspending them from ceiling support boxes, she arranges them in groupings to create installations and environments. Her approach is a pairing of impulse, labor, intention, and chance. It is important that the work has a tangible sense of life, directly informed by its method of creation, and the physicality of its materials. The presence of the work underscores its themes.
A large part of her inspiration comes from the forms and the forces of nature. Many of the shapes and configurations allude to motions or unnamable organic processes. There are recurring references to vital fluids like water and blood; physical actions like falling and spilling; qualities such as delicacy and weightlessness, dualities such as beauty and decay. Over the years the work has moved from abstraction toward representation, yet it remains suggestive, not literal. Fundamentally, she is driven by the desire to reveal the poetic relationship between what is known and seen and what is non-verbal and ineffable in life around us.