Kate Breakey “Las Sombras & Golden Stardust”
Littlejohn Contemporary
This event has ended.
Kate Breakey’s Las Sombras/The Shadows are contact prints known as photograms or photogenic drawings. In these prints she has covered the photographic paper with a layer of translucent golden paint to tone them sepia, these works have a similar look of Victorian illustrations yet their sensibility is distinctly modern. Making pictures without a camera, like early nineteenth-century photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, Breakey also shares their affinity for recording the natural world in scientific detail as well as with artistic beauty. These shadows are full of light. Breakey’s luminous images of coyotes and whipsnakes, hopping mice and scorpions, are filled with her love of the American Southwest, where she lives, and the animals, plants, and insects that inhabit the land. In the way she poses the animals, Breakey’s coyotes & rabbits dance; her birds fly.
This is an art that entails both the primitive and something ethereal. In her text for her book Las Sombras/The Shadows the photographer says that she burns these “shadows” of animals and plants onto photographic paper “with light and with love.”
Also on view in this exhibition are the artist’s Orotones, her “Golden Stardust” series.
Unlike the photograms, these works are photographs digitally printed onto UV museum art glass upon which the artist burnishes a layer of 24K goldleaf. Photographs taken from many areas around the world where the artist has travelled, from Scotland to Australia to Italy and beyond, the artist’s keen eye finds magic in every landscape and every object she encounters.
This will be Kate Breakey’s first solo exhibition with Littlejohn Contemporary. Since 1980, her work has appeared in more than ninety, one-person exhibitions and more than fifty group exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, China, New Zealand, and France. A native of South Australia who has also lived and worked in Texas, Ms. Breakey now resides and photographs in the desert outside Tucson. The major archive of Breakey’s work — traditional photographs as well as photograms — is held by
the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcos. Las Sombras/The Shadows is the third Breakey book in the Wittliff’s Southwestern & Mexican Photography series. Her books include Birds/Flowers published in 2002 by Eastland Books and Slowlight published by Etherton Gallery in 2012. Breakey has produced three substantial monographs in collaboration with The Wittliff Collections and the University of Texas Press, beginning with Small Deaths (2001), followed by Painted Light (2010) a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of prolific image making, and Las Sombras/The Shadows (2012) which is comprised of many hundreds of images, from a bald eagle to tiny moths and flies. This series is a continuation of her lifetime investigation of the natural world
which in her own words is “brimming with fantastic mysterious beautiful things.”
“My art,” she says, “is about connection to all living things on Earth.”
Media
Schedule
from March 17, 2016 to April 23, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-03-17 from 18:00 to 20:00