Gareth Jenkins – Exhibition Opening Talk: Tall Tales and True, Kathryn Cowen Wednesday Oct 9, 2013: A-M Gallery, Newtown
Tall Tales and True
Kathryn Cowen
A-M Gallery
Newtown
9 Oct - 2 Nov 2013
Opening talk by Gareth Jenkins:
I’ve known Kath and observed her work for nearly 10 years now, since her days at the National Art School. During this time she has exhibited widely and been well received in numerous awards and competitions.
I have always appreciated Kath’s approach to art-making, perceiving an organic, committed drive to create, paired with a serious, cerebral appreciation of artistic vision as a webbing of influences. In this present body of work impressions are drawn in from surrounding worlds of personal experience, art, literature, history and science; deconstructed and synthesized into fresh visions, echoes of the world coalesce into new tales.
As you can read in Kath’s artist statement the figurative inspirations for the work you see around you evolve from the notion of “photography as a repository of stored memory, here [Kath] “has appropriated images from personal, familial and historical archives” [from which], a strange land emerges where “odd folk” traverse something ‘other’.
And it is this Otherness that I’m really interested in and which I feel is at the core of the work’s ability to hold the gaze and the mind, why they intrigue.
This Otherness begins with that notion of “photography as a repository of stored memory”, a phrase which, to me, suggests that the photographic process captures not just the play of light but the play of history, recording a trace of the subject’s inner life inherent to that frozen moment in time, not directly accessible to the un-associated viewer but imbuing the image with a powerful aura of Otherness, something present but unknown - unknowable, that space of interior experience, thought, emotion - a space that is rich in possibility yet ambiguous and it is this combination that lures the viewer’s imagination into the work.
This Otherness is heighten in Kath’s rendering of these images, as the figures are stripped of original back-dropped context, many brought to the fore before the swirl and run and blot of star-lit evenings.
And it is in this way that “a strange land has indeed emerged” and it does feel like one land rather than lands, the cosmic environment lifting up behind many of the figures to give an overall coherence to the exhibition. Figures that seem as much embedded in space as suspended before it. Swimmers diving first through heavy star-rich air before breaking the fluid surface of The World Beneath.
Mr Nanoo, hooked up to the cosmos through an electro-encephalograph - mechanistic wires transforming into organic tendrils trailing off into deep space.
The Space Rangers, who manage to exude an intensity of purpose, while simultaneously seeming to dematerialise as they climb into the sky.
These works speak to the idea that all physical matter, human or otherwise originates from space, out of which these “Odd Folk” seem to have manifested for just a moment.
The cumulative effect, for me, is the transformation of what may have been mere figures into characters embedded in narratives suggested but not defined, simultaneously capable of stepping from and into multiple stories depending on the imaginative impulse of the viewer. Here the Stargazer in his goggles has just climbed out of a billy cart, or a go-cart or a spacecraft for that matter; has just won a race, or survived a crash.
The back-stories to the works in this exhibition are uncertain and malleable but I am left in no doubt that they are there and that they matter and that ultimately, without quite knowing it we have become involved, and in some instances suddenly see ourselves looking back at us, remembering that time on our own billy cart, flying through that wattle tree, eyes and mouth open, filling with a colony of flying ants.
I hope that you too are as intrigued by the Otherness residing in these images as I am, and that within the space left open in the work you have found or created your own tales, the tall and the true. I certainly need ask no more from art than what is happening here: that it opens a space which lures my imagination to enter and discover and create.
Kathryn Cowen, Mr Nanoo, 2013
Kathryn Cowen, Space Rangers, 2013