NYAB Event - Kate Teale "The Sea Is All Around Us"

Kate Teale "The Sea Is All Around Us"

Studio 10

This event has ended.

In this series, Teale examines two vastly different subjects concurrently: the domestic space of her bed and the Japanese Tsunami of March 2011. She identifies and depicts the visual similarities between the warm folds of her bedclothes and the inexorable swell of the Tsunami caught in freeze-framed footage. The soft graphite of the drawings coupled with Teale’s smooth rendering of the water’s surface belie the wave’s inevitable destruction. Threats to domestic stability, with particular reference to climate change, and the inexhaustible effort to find places where calm and equilibrium can be established are underlying themes.

“I see the beds as representative of a larger, universal space, rather like Chinese artists used Scholars’ Rocks as models for mountains. I believe that our view of the domestic echoes the wider world, and, to quote Richard Artschwager – “everything of interest is always right there”’ Teale stated. Both the drawings and the paintings are made through a process of removal and erasure. The drawn line and graphite dust are worked with erasers and chamois leather. The paintings are mostly made in one sitting while the oil paint is wet. The surface of the painting is covered then removed to ‘reveal’ the image. Teale says, “I like the urgency of working against time, and the process of subtraction as a way of ‘finding’ an image”.

After watching videos of the disaster on YouTube, she found that the footage fell into two main categories – professional news coverage, often shot from helicopters far above, and unedited home movies shot with great immediacy as people fled from the waves. For Teale the frenetic quality of the images and sound contributed to the power and disorientation of the amateur films. After watching one example she said, “filmed through trees from a small hill, a whole village of terracotta-tiled houses flowed by, creaking and groaning. I was struck by the extreme wrongness of the motion. The much-used English phrase ‘safe as houses’ is turned on its head”. Climate change and extreme weather events, even distant disasters, are now experienced more intimately via personal technology. Using screen-capture to freeze ‘stills’ of video, Teale collected images then made drawings from the many screen shots as a means to consider the event and the image, and make it tactile.

Kate Teale has had solo shows at Kristen Frederickson Contemporary, NYC, UMass Hampden Gallery, First New York, and Yearsley Spring in Philadelphia, and in the UK. She has exhibited in various group shows including Bushwick Basel with Valentine Gallery; at Monya Rowe and at Jim Kempner galleries in Chelsea; with Storefront and Sideshow in Brooklyn. She has a solo show coming up in 2014 at Richmond Center for The Arts, Western Michigan University. Since 2009 Teale has run and curated shows focusing on under-represented artists and artists’ projects at ‘Big&Small/Casual Gallery’. She was a NYFA Fellow in Painting in 2008.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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