Katie Bell: False Stage
False Stage
A Solo Exhibition by Katie Bell
Bolivar Gallery, University of Kentucky
January 14 through February 12
Artist Statement
I make physical, sculptural works that are based off of architecture and found objects. I gather material that hovers between nameable and nameless, function and functionless. I am looking for color, shape, weight and confusion in its description. Objects and materials that transform depending on their surroundings. I search for some of my material on Craigslist and pick it up from someone’s living room. I go to salvage yards and sift through piles of discarded material. I fabricate objects, armatures, and paintings based off of what I find.
My current work investigates ideas from the Russian Constructivists, as El Lissitzky puts it, “interchange station between painting and architecture”. The wall becomes the armature for the material to situate itself acting as paint strokes, fields of color, and abstract shapes. The gallery becomes the stage for the objects to encounter one another, acting as both character and set. Using woodworking tools as a form of mark making and construction materials as a palette, I build paintings and sculptures. The compositions are in a state of freeze-frame, as if holding their breath until the viewer leaves.
Katie Bell | Bio
Katie Bell is an artist originally from Rockford, Illinois (b. 1985). She received her BA from Knox College (Galesburg, IL) in 2008 where she studied fine art and race and gender studies. She graduated in 2011 from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) with an MFA in Painting. Bell has shown her work at a variety of venues including Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), Spencer Brownstone Gallery (NYC), Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago), and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA). Her work has been written about in BOMB Magazine, Whitewall, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Sculpture Magazine, and Art in America. In 2011 she was an artist in residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Space Program based in Brooklyn, NY. She was awarded a fellowship in painting by the New York Foundation for the Arts and in 2016 the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship. Bell lives and works in New York, NY.