NEW YORK, NY.- Garvey|Simon Art Access is presenting First Folds, a solo exhibition of new work by American artist Kate Carr. This is the artist’s first solo show in New York. The exhibition runs from November 13 – December 13, 2014.
Kate Carr’s wall-mounted sculptures begin with her choice of materials: Baltic birch plywood and dyed wool felt. Her interests in line and form stem from the materials themselves. Their straightforward, simple nature inspires Carr to reveal the material—perhaps in a fresh way—rather than transform it. Her method of working explores and exploits the innate differences in the materials: hard and soft, smooth and textured, loose and dense, heavy and light. Adherence to simple, geometric forms with linear edges creates a context and a boundary within which the artist has space to discover those material juxtapositions.
Carr is following line inherent in the wood, as well as on the edges of cut fabric. Her mark-making and color fields are derived solely from richly dyed wool felt. The surfaces of her work -- from the waxed, smooth plywood to the subtle fuzziness of brightly colored felt -- are engaging and tactile, offering an immediacy, familiarity, and a temptation to touch. At the same time, the two materials offer a yin-yang; male-female contrast and allude to societal associations with each. Carr is participating both in the current conversation regarding theories of contemporary craft as well as Post-Minimal feminist concerns.
In her newest body of work, First Folds, Kate Carr intersects lines and planes to create previously unexplored three-dimensional angles. Carr seeks to isolate the initial gesture of transformation. Challenging the resolute flatness of her primary materials, she subtly constructs the wall-mounted work in a manner that suggests bending, shifting, folding and creasing. Using high-key color, the artist is balancing opposing forces in her work more so than ever before.
Inspired by the initial and purposeful creases and folds inherent in the creation of origami objects, each work in this exhibition explores various states of becoming. They are dialectically both still and in motion - physical and visual manifestations of potential, transition, and the in-between. The work addresses such questions as: What does the beginning of change look like, and can we pay attention to the first steps in any process with the same importance as the end result?
Carr’s impeccable craftsmanship is labor-intensive and offers testimony to her intimate engagement with her materials in the studio. As she states: The inescapable imperfection of something cut by hand (or drawn by hand) has its own irregular, flawed beauty that gives the work a human quality I find necessary and inevitable.
Kate Carr (b. 1976 in Anchorage, Alaska] received her BA in studio art from Marlboro College, Vermont, and her MFA in sculpture in 2005 from the University of Iowa. She has exhibited throughout the United States in both solo and group exhibitions. This is her first solo exhibition in New York. Carr is also the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2009-10), MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2010), UCross Foundation Residency, WY [2012] to name a few. The artist currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
