NYAB Event - Suzanne Laura Kammin “I Am That”

Suzanne Laura Kammin “I Am That”

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts

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Kathryn Markel Fine Arts presents I Am That, a solo exhibition featuring new paintings by Suzanne Laura Kammin.

Suzanne Laura Kammin’s abstract paintings, in essence, are self-portraits. The relationship between figure and ground correlates to the relationship between the self and everything else, both physical and psychological. This is illustrated with the juxtaposition of hard and soft edges and the meeting of intense color combinations. Her newest body of work continues this dynamic.

Kammin is influenced by 20th century painting in form and Eastern philosophy in concept, particularly the idea of an interconnectedness of all things. These muses play out in the reciprocation between the background and foreground of her works. Kammin connects Modernist aesthetic elements with the concept of yin and yang, where opposite forces are interdependent. Layers, lines and dots are distinct elements, but none is more important than another. They employ a flatness that is taken from the Modernist sense of space, which pushes positive and negative space front and back, to and fro. She allows the color to be loose in some areas and obsessively controlled in others. These visceral layers point to the idea that we ourselves are fluid and ever changing.

While the works are concerned with the formal aspects of traditional painting, Kammin rarely allows the actual mark of the paintbrush to remain. Areas of color are smoothed to obscure the mode of creation so the viewer stays focused on what the work is doing, not how it was made. This allows the work to assert itself, moving it beyond references to the traditional process of painting.

Suzanne Laura Kammin earned a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has received two grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and was nominated for The New School Distinguished University Teaching Award. Currently, she is a lecturer at Caldwell College, Caldwell, NJ; a part-time Assistant Professor, at Parsons, The New School for Design, New York, NY; Founder and Instructor, Left Bank Studio School, Newark, NJ. Her work has been exhibited in the US and Canada. She lives and works in Newark, NJ.