KATE V ROBERTSON : PIECES
FEINKOST, BERLIN
JULY 3 - SEPTEMBER 4, 2010
FEINKOST is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Germany of Scottish artist Kate V Robertson. Entitled “Pieces” the presentation of this new body of work introduces Robertson’s practice of sculpture and site-specific installation that incorporates materials hinged on precarity and slippery states of being.
The work of Kate V Robertson operates in dialogue with an art history of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Ceal Floyer and Charles Ray. Addressing moments that probe the literal and metaphorical structures of the white cube in ways both tongue-in-cheek and uncanny, the artist uses the exhibition space as equal parts host and material. Objects and installations have the roughness and immediacy of a napkin doodle in their bricoleur’s handiwork whilst retaining an awkward tension that is more ambivalent than absolute.
The site-specific work Untitled (Paperwork) is a floor-to-ceiling stack of myriad sheets, creating a rainbow of grays resembling a bureaucrat’s endless column to Brancusi. Barricading the doorway between exhibition spaces the work is both a feeble obstruction and a teetering caryatid for the gallery. The nearby Untitled (Revelation) is a beguiling riff on Michael Asher’s practice of dissolving gallery architectures showing in this case its capability of merely sloughing away.
Untitled (Movie Still) offers a meditation on image and anti-image, the sum of one’s parts, as seen in a dot matrix, and the moment those parts decompose into an illegible and singular dissolution. The loss of image integrity becomes an exploration of the stain which, combined with properties found in gravity, age and corrosion, is a common trace throughout Robertson’s practice as a natural gesture of mark-making and can be seen in accompanying works of ink saturations and burn residues.
The wall work Spontane is a poor-man’s neon fashioned from the conductive nickel chromium wire such as that found in your average toaster oven. With a sudden flash of electricity the text comes to life radiating a heat of energy. The call and answer of form mimicking function is resonated in the ceiling work Untitled (Mutation), a synaesthetic extension of the gallery structure and the transformation of a light wave into a sonic relief.
The exhibition title “Pieces” is a punning embrace of that nondescript term one uses to describe a generic survey of artwork and parts compositing the whole. For all of the pieces in the exhibition, process is paramount becoming a reflection of the material and oftentimes reducing the object to its inherent meanings, elemental properties, anonymous origins or inner contradictions.
