ART CITIES:N.York -Katherine Bauer

Katherine Bauer is an artist who works primarily with 16mm film. She often uses film in a way that incorporates sculpture, photography and installation. Much of her work uses mythologies and narratives adapted from her travels across the United States and Southeastern Asia. The materiality of celluloid is important to her work which often deals with decay, sex and horror.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Microscope Archive

In “Of the Quarry Land”, her solo exhibition at Microscope Gallery, Katherine Bauer continues an investigation begun with her series “Teenage Dream Sequence” in new works created through ritualistic performances during which the artist exposes 16mm film and photographic paper rolls to elements of nature like: plants, soil and moonlight, among others. This exhibition debuts Bauer’s “Lunagrams”, large black & white photograms made with datura, nightshades and other moonflowers exposed to moonlight, exhibited alongside hand-processed 16mm films shot at dusk at the quarry that are dense with the turquoise imagery of the unnaturally saturated blue water caused by limestone excavation. Also on view are analog c-prints of enlarged 35mm film photographs shot by the artist on site from both above and under water. Bauer, who for several years has centered her works around various rites of passage of the American teenager, focuses this time on the abandoned industrial quarry, presented as a “Shrine to the inherently transgressive activity that has led to the need to create sacred spaces”, or as privately owned property that adolescents and others commonly trespass, as well as an industrial wasteland undergoing a transitional process of reclamation by the earth.

Info: Microscope Gallery, 1329 Willoughby Avenue, #2B, Brooklyn, Duration: 1/7-7/8/16, Days & Hours: Thu-Mon 13:00-18:00, www.microscopegallery.com