Kate Newby
I memorized it I loved it so much
LAUREL GITLEN
122 Norfolk St. New York
http://www.laurelgitlen.com/
June 26 – July 31, 2015
122 Norfolk St. New York
http://www.laurelgitlen.com/
June 26 – July 31, 2015
Laurel Gitlen is proud to present the first US solo exhibition of the New Zealand, New York-based
artist Kate Newby. Working with a variety of media including installation, textile, ceramics,
casting and glass, Newby is a sculptor who is committed to exploring and putting
pressure on the limits and nature of sculpture. As such, she is interested in not only space,
volume, texture and materials, but where and how sculpture happens. Varying in scale,
works are liable to take place fugaciously, as in the case of her ceramic skipping stones
which she asks people to skip and have themselves photographed doing so, on the street in
a given city, as in her concrete, poured puddles, or in the gallery proper, in subtly, but noticeably
present architectural disruptions of the space itself. In every case the work bears
a strong link to not just the every day, but to the lived—it wants to experience as much as
it generates experience, collecting and registering the traces of the passing world, which
it incorporates and is incorporated into. It is for this reason that if the handmade plays a
very important role in what she does not merely romantic or even retrograde, it is rather
the aesthetic byproduct of a position that shamelessly embraces direct experience over
the mediated. Indeed, winsomely frank, Newby’s work wields a disarming familiarity, which
is not unlike like seeing an old friend who starts the conversation by saying: “Tell me about
yourself.”
For her exhibition at Laurel Gitlen, Newby presents a broad variety of works including an
architectural intervention, which manifests through a wooden platform, an alteration of
the gallery’s lighting, and a rope snaking through the gallery. Other works include a rock, a
ceramic wind chime as well as a new glass wind chime, a concrete puddle, a postcard piece,
and other elements.
–Chris Sharp, June 2015
Kate Newby, I memorized it I loved it so much will be on view at the gallery from June 26–
July 31, 2015. Her work has been presented internationally, including recent solo exhibitions
at Lulu, Mexico City (2014); La Loge, Brussels (2014); Fogo Island Gallery, Newfoundland
(2013); and Hopkinson Mossmon, Auckland (2013)