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13/5/2003

Katy Martin

Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art, New York

"Flesh, Paint, and Plaster"

New York, NY - Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art (PSCA) announces the opening of a new exhibit entitled FLESH, PAINT, AND PLASTER, featuring large format digital prints by Katy Martin, a New York artist.

The exhibition, "Flesh, Paint, and Plaster" will feature large digital prints from 2002 and 2003 by Katy Martin, a New York artist who is continually rethinking the fundamentals of painting and its interaction with sculpture, photography, performance, and printmaking. Since Martin paints directly on her skin, she uses photography to capture a single image from this process. She then projects this image onto sculpture, in order to create an ambiguity between flesh and plaster and to abstract the color and form. This image then becomes the basis for her current exploration of painting's relationship to sculpture, which she realizes through digital printmaking.

The digital medium allows Martin greater control of color. In these prints, the large format sets up an active surface, much like painting on canvas. The artist faces color issues in much the same way as she did when she was making abstract paintings on canvas in the 1980s and 1990s.

If the ambition of art may be to transcend, then in this body of work Martin takes hold of the temporal and the literal - using her body as a sculptural or plastic material - to play on illusions of control. In this way a paradox is created between letting go and holding on despite the body's inevitable change.

The colorful, striking images of painted nudes are familiar yet distorted, comforting yet challenging. The work is playful and seemingly spontaneous. Martin's new work incorporates gorgeous color, visceral portrayals of the nude, and an exhilarating look at painting in a whole new way.

Martin creates work that blurs the traditional definitions of an artist by medium, i.e. sculptor, painter, photographer. Today, artists have an almost unlimted array of tools available to them. Martin luxuriates in the beauty that each medium offers and draws on each to create her extraordinary images.

Martin, whose first show at PSCA was in 2001, has also had solo shows at PS122 and Hampshire College. Her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine and Be-Hold. Her film work is included in the MoMA permanent collection. Martin received an MFA from Vermont College and was awarded a NEA Fellowship in Painting.

Deborah Gorlin's book of poetry, Bodily Course, won the l996 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. She has recently published poems in the Forward, Bomb, Green Mountains Review, American Poetry Review, and Harvard Review.

Skinside Out (a 10 minute, 16mm, color, sound film by Bill Brand and Katy Martin) features paint on skin, carried out in an expressionist mode on both of the filmmakers' bodies. The emphasis is on the pleasure of looking -- at the edge of repulsion -- and the implications of making public an essentially private gesture. The film posits painting as a gendered, bodily act, whose location shifts continually within a context that's always changing. Images filmed in the studio are juxtaposed with footage of a construction barge along the Hudson. By examining both in relation to surface, the work paradoxically looks for what lies within, while questioning who and where we take ourselves to be.

Martin's new works and this exhibit are made possible with support from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund/New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Opening May 14th, 6 - 9 PM, thru June

In addition, on Wednesday, May 21 at 7:30 p.m., PSCA will host an evening with the artist, which will include a poetry reading by Deborah Gorlin and a screening of Skinside Out, a film Martin made recently. The evening events are free and open to the public.

Following this exhibit, PSCA will present Works on Paper, opening June 11th, 6 - 9 PM.

RSVP 646 613 1252

The gallery is open on Wednesday through Saturday from Noon to 6 PM, and by appointment.

Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art
86 Walker Street Floor Six New York NY 10013
646 613 1252

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