EXCESS

EXCESS
Kathryn Knudsen
On view:
July 29 – September 10
Reception: Friday July 29, 2022 6:00-8:00 PM
“Kathryn’s art utilizes a variety of traditional media, abstract forms, and found objects to produce an artistic vision that can heal, refashion, and beautify. The result–an unpredictable labyrinth of oil paint, canvas, fabric, thread, paper, beads, and other materials–is as luminous as it is provocative, a flash of the unconscious, a dream, a moment of deja vu. Picking up objects that might otherwise languish in scrap heaps, second-hand clothing stores, or boxes of discarded papers, fabrics, and memories, Kathryn’s art reintegrates the power of transformed media with therapeutic promise of beauty and artistic experience. In these paintings, sculptures, and installations, the possibility of refashioning the world of discarded consumption becomes an artistic reality, something more than an aspiration, a wholly new experience in itself. To experience Kathryn’s art is to realize that the very fabric of our culture and everyday lives can be recast and reclaimed, just as nature does in its endless march of life and desire. The oddness of the human figures, the opalescence of the textures, the quirkiness of the colors–all of these are the life blood of a culture revised. It is a vision in which nothing–no memories, no tradition, no promise–is beyond reclamation.”

— John Williams, Professor of Humanities, Yale University