At The Horizon. | Katherine Spinella

At The Horizon.
Katherine Spinella

October 4 – 26, 2018
*EXTENDED TO NOVEMBER 16*

Reception: Thursday, October 4, 6-8 PM

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At the horizon. transports the refuse of commerce into fractured, elevated, and philosophically personified artifacts. Katherine Spinella uses printmaking, sculpture, and photography as a means of archiving and deconstructing commonplace objects and materials in search of their embedded ideological meaning. Moving between image and object-making, she constructs meaning through the process of collecting, assembling, flattening, archiving and deconstructing. Mining both the physical and virtual, forms are compounded and layered into fragmented moments. Plastic grasses, crumpled wrappers and cast geologies become subsumed by blindspots, conflating overlooked forms and material histories while transforming the familiar through abstraction in an effort to render it anew. Aiming for a visual sensation of hypertouch (i.e. handled, discarded and renewed), neo-geological casts become symbolic stand-ins for an imagined archeology of a dystopic present. She considers life distilled and concentrated into the quiet physicality of objects that are cast away. Looking at representations of the natural world and discarded objects that are byproducts of human activity as seen through the lens of commercialism, Spinella explores the fallacy of our perception of human dominance and mastery over the natural world.

Katherine Spinella is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. She explores the fallacy of human dominance and mastery over the natural world, while transporting the refuse of commerce into fractured, elevated, and philosophically personified artifacts. As a collector, Spinella uses printmaking, sculpture, and photography as a means of archiving and deconstructing commonplace objects and materials in search of their embedded ideological meaning.

Spinella has exhibited at Musée de Charmey in Charmey, Switzerland and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center and Portland Art Museum in Portland, OR and most recently at Carnation Contemporary, Woodshop Projects and One Grand Gallery. Images of her work are published with essay Artist as Archivist by Georgia Erger in Peripheral Vision’s Journal No. 7. She has recieved grants from the Oregon Arts Comission, attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Kala Art Institute, and Womens Studio Workshop and is an MFA (2013) graduate from the University of Oregon.

Along with a rigrious studio practice, Spinella is Co-founder and Member of Carnation Contemporary; a collective of Portland-based artists who support critical and contemporary artwork from emerging and mid-career artists.