KATE BONNER: The space in things

About

Kate Bonner's works are anchored in digital processes in dialog with drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and collage. In her third solo exhibition with the gallery, titled The space in things, she continues to redefine the photographic genre vis-à-vis her exploration of painting and drawing. 

Bonner creates digital brushes and paint with photographic material. The photograph becomes a meditative action that claims a present moment, making a mark and moving through a duration of thought and feeling. As paint, the photograph is dragged across a digital space and applied to a surface through a motion. “I’m drawing with photographs,” she says. “When I draw, my hand moves without me, acting before I think, tracing the outline of space and time in a different way than a camera can.”

A photo flattens space and time into a fixed frame, but when that image is dragged and smeared across a digital space, it is broken open. In this action — the cutting, the erasing, the digital painting — the photographs lose chronicled detail. They lose main characters, supporting cast and contextual clues. They lose nostalgia, document and narrative. With the plot cut from the center of the photograph, the image separates from its intention and becomes lines, shape and color. The photo loses its fixed identity, and perspective, and in this unencumbered space invites a new frame of reference.

Kate Bonner (b. 1980, Saginaw, MI) received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012 and her BFA from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. Bonner has been awarded artist residencies at the School of Visual Arts and Inside Zone in Romania. Her work has been exhibited at The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA; the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL; as well as numerous solo and group exhibitions presented at The Hole, Et al Projects, The Pit, Queen’s Nails, The Popular Workshop, Important Projects, and Ever Gold; NADA New York, UNTITLED Miami Beach, Paris Photo Los Angeles, Material Art Fair, CDMX; Art Los Angeles Contemporary, and EXPO Chicago. Bonner lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, and is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

For further information, including images and previews, please call 213-395-0762, or email: gallery@luisdejesus.com.