Kate Vrijmoet: Essential Gestures
Artist's Reception, Thursday, February 11, 6 - 9 pm
CoCA
Ballard, 6413 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107
On View Weekdays 10 am - 5
pm, February 11 - March 7, 2010
Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) is pleased to present
“Essential Gestures” – an exhibition of paintings and drawings
by Kate Vrijmoet who recently settled in Seattle. The exhibition features 8
paintings on canvas and 17 charcoal drawings.
That Vrijmoet’s work
is based in figurative portraiture is well represented by her charcoal
drawings. Yet the artist’s radical project is immediately apparent in her
“accident series” in which a single figure is in the process of a
horrific (and usually grotesquely bloody) accident with a chainsaw, shotgun,
axe or similar tools and weapons. Her handling of the paint matches the
situation’s goriness – melting bodies tossing explosive splatters of
blood. Often, her subjects seem not yet to be aware of the violence they have
perpetrated on themselves: The viewer plays the role of the witness much as he
might watch a horror movie – completely aware of the violence and agony
that awaits the victim’s realization.
Vrijmoet’s subject,
however, is less the gore than the moment the gore marks: A moment of waking,
of a new consciousness, of self-awareness. Her subject is trauma itself –
the word coming from the German for “dream.” The accidents mark the
rest of the victim’s life, whether it is merely to be a few more seconds
or to lived from then on without an arm, a leg or an eye – or with deep
physical and psychological scars.
The idea of waking is what draws
Vrijmoet’s main bodies of work together. The centerpiece of the exhibition
is her 6’ by 10’ “Creation (of Melancholy Fate) by Supreme
Being” which but for the title could be seen as a family swimming pool
scene viewed from under water. Yet, metaphorically, the work reads as chaos in
the primordial soup or as the moment of waking from a dream or a spiritual
birth.
Vrijmoet’s drawings not only reveal the artist’s
virtuosity but her serious project as an observer of the human condition.
Together with the water paintings and the accident paintings, the drawings help
us see how Vrijmoet pictures people as defined by their bodies, their minds,
their self-awareness as well as trauma and scars.
Vrijmoet’s
artistic vision combines Pop Art (think Andy Warhol’s “Car
Accident”) with the sublime (think Edmund Burke who in 1757 wrote
“Astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are
suspended, with some degree of horror."
Vrijmoet received her MFA from
Syracuse University. Her work has been shown in dozens of exhibitions around
the country. “Essential Gestures” – Vrijmoet’s first solo
exhibition in Seattle – will be on view at CoCA Ballard through March 7,
2010. Wine and hors d'oeuvres will be served at the public reception on
Thursday, February 11.
Visit
Kate's website here.
Paul McKee: Excerpts from Trophies of the American Home
Artist's Reception, Thursday, March 25, 7 - 9pm
CoCA
Belltown, 2721 First Ave. (at Clay), Seattle, WA 98121
Reception takes place
in the Club Room of the Avenue One Condominiums, directly above the
Gallery.
On View 24 hours every day, February 11, 2009 - March 28,
2010
Paul D. McKee received his MFA from Wichita State University
in 2008. This exhibit is a variation of his thesis exhibition titled, Trophies
of the American Home. He has transformed the CoCA Belltown Gallery into what,
at first glance, appears to be an old-world Victorian living room but after
closer inspection twists and becomes something more challenging and
confrontational. Of this work Paul states, "I want the viewers to acknowledge
the objects' existence- their histories, their contents and their connections
to diverse perceptions of family, home and sanctuary. I want their personal
stories and my own to establish common ground regardless of the viewer's
upbringings, levels of tolerance or feelings about non-normative sexualities
and spaces; I want them to use the work as a bridge between."
