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6/11/2013

Kate Steciw

Elaine Levy Project, Bruxelles

Must Be Another Manufacturer

Kate Steciw is democratic in her amalgamating; everything from stock photography, hand painted photographic backgrounds to mass produced wall art purchased on Amazon has a voice and a use - there is no hierarchy of value or meaning. Singular agency locks horns with the multitude of generic consumer objects and images. Steciw's work addresses this relationship with a one-to-many-to-one approach. Licensing images from stock photography agencies, she seeks out the most generic representations, a bathroom floor, a carabiner, a table setting and composites the images in Photoshop. Her deft distortions of these images belies her experience as a commercial retoucher; tools and techniques employed are those used daily by image technicians who largely try to hide their presence in the production line of commercial image making.
Steciw's interventions extend to pieces of mass-produced wall art that she purchases on the Internet and then bends into chaotic lumps of metal. The words in the original, "Live, Laugh, Love", are scarcely recognizable in the resultant sculptures via a gesture that is at once destructive and transformative. Toying with ideas of value, both commercial and aesthetic, the artist's critique is echoed in the consumer reviews of the original object; "Laugh at my misjudgment" wrote one disappointed e-shopper, "Very Disappointed that they were so small. Usually I see the words quite large on a wall in a decorative magazine. Must be from another manufacturer".
The artist's canvases are equally evasive, their disingenuous abstract surfaces are in reality hand painted photographic background, similar to the kind used in school portraits. Steciw's only intervention here is creation of the shape; usually the first choice in a painter's process, conversely here it is the last. By stretching the canvases into recognizable modernist forms, she calls attention to the painterly gestures that would otherwise remain invisible. These canvases, like her photographic work, unpack the auxiliary detritus of the representational process, undermining subjective authorship and veering towards an engagement with appropriation and the Pictures Generation, almost like the repeated samples in electronic music. As Jean-Luc Godard said, “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to”.
To better understand Steciw's assemblages, here is an abbreviated abecedarius generated from the keywords she uses as titles.
Active chrome climber
connection danger fit
gear gold guide
industry nobody objects
security silver strong
Air blue cleanliness
delicate fume graceful
haze mystic shower
soft spirit time
white zen
Abstract body
childhood concept
elegant fluff
ornithology puzzle
wild wooden word
Alligator animal appetizer
beast body dinner
leather linen lunch
rolled romantic skin
table wine

(Lorenzo Durantini)

Opening Thursday November 7 from 6 to 9PM

Elaine Levy Project
Rue Fourmoisstraat 9, Bruxelles
Hours: Thursday–Saturday 2–6pm and by appointment

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