Kate Metten

Statement

Kate Metten (born 1991, Vancouver, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist whose material investigations into oil painting and ceramics oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Her work borrows from the entirety of painting’s history and that of ceramic anthropology. This methodology allows a flexibility to address painterly concerns with clay, research into colour theory, visual perception and the still life, while also reflecting on Modernist philosophies of the Bauhaus, the unmaking of craft and material hierarchies. She is deeply concerned with phenomenology and the physicality of form. The internal logic of her artwork is determined by intuitive construction and response to material; Images and objects arise out of multi-layers of decision making to develop forms that are at once recognizable yet unfamiliar. The indexical quality of both painting and ceramic render dynamic impressions of mass and surface that preserve evidence of the hand and mind in motion. Metten’s preoccupation with the mechanics of looking, the psychological play of optical illusions, and our brain’s response to reductionist imagery confronts the viewer with the conditioning of their own perception.

GlogauAIR Project

Bauhaus’ Modernist grid is a framework within which colour theory and optical effects can articulate new research into neuroscience and cognitive processing. Dealing fundamentally with the language of abstraction, for this residency, Metten will deepen her connection to Bauhaus philosophies around craftsmanship and colour theory. One aspect of her inquiry involves a dialogue with neuroscientists at Freie Universität Berlin to interpret new research by making paintings that precisely render geometric compositional strategies to convey illusionistic systems that trigger eye movement through sensations of refractory colour and rhythmic pattern. Colour, light, and geometry play with our visual system to spark higher mental functions that remind the viewer of their subjective psychological context. These works investigate visual perception’s mechanics in the brain which inherently distort the symbols that govern our lives and therefore confronts the viewer with their own subjectivity. Metten is a multidisciplinary artist working in ceramics and painting; she funded this residency through the sale of handmade ceramic tableware. Using her time in Berlin to connect further with the modernist philosophies of the Bauhaus’ will bring their foundational research in colour theory into the 21st Century through the intersection of art and science.

CV Summary

EDUCATION

• 2017 BFA, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

• 2020 Old Ideas, CSA Space, Vancouver, BC
• 2019 The Thinking Eye, Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, BC
• 2019 Untitled, Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver, BC

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

• Current July 30-Oct 2 2021 We Do Not Work Alone, Nanaimo Art Gallery, Nanaimo, BC
• Current July 23 – Aug 27 2021 Together Again, Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, BC
• 2020 RHIZOM relation 29. Pinseruten 2020, Kunstkollektivet 8B, Denmark
• 2019 The Form Will Find Its Way: Contemporary Ceramic Sculptural Abstraction, NCECA, Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
• 2018 Leaning Out of Windows (LOoW), Emily Carr University, Vancouver, BC
• 2017 88 Artists from 88 Years, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC
• 2011 We’ve Been Here Before, Art Matters Festival, Studio 303, Belgo, Montreal QC
• 2009 Space-Time/Parallels in Perception, Buschlen-Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, BC

PUBLIC ART

• 2019 Highland Rose, The Canada Line Art Installation, King Edward Station, Vancouver, BC

Gallery