Kathryn Hart: SEARCHING

About

ContinuEd Project Space at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents Searching, a solo show by artist Kathryn Hart.  The exhibition will be on view from May 2-30, 2018 in the Project Spaces CE locations at 209 East 23rd Street, Main floor, and 380 2nd Ave, 8th floor.  This is Hart’s first solo show at the SVA.

In this solo exhibition, Hart explores the web of emotions confronted in the search to begin anew, and the burden of choice.  She continues her dialogue with evolving identity and the hope for new beginnings amidst a maze of emotional conflict, pain, and self-doubt.

Hart offers, “after life leaves us tumbled upside down, completely derailed, we pick ourselves up and begin the search for…personal truth, enlightenment, growth, love, connections, a place to feel comfortable, a place to call home.  We even search for the place to start the search.  My flightpath was obliterated by an onslaught of happenings – my husband’s cancer, the deaths of both my parents, and my own struggle with an ongoing disease and trauma.  How do I move forward?

The search starts with one intent, one thought, one moment, one breath, one catalyst, one cell, one dot.  A series of dots, actions, sparks, ideas, or energy becomes a line, a trajectory.  Lines reveal potential paths ahead and scars of the ones just followed.” 

Kathryn Hart presents this theme across an array of media, which further illustrates the plethora of options for the journey.  A site-specific installation of hundreds of lines, wires and embedded glass lenses explores the miasma of available routes, some more circuitous and arduous, some involving forced self-reflection.  Hart uses these laboriously hand tied knots and line to translate a period of unsettling uncertainty into a path to move forward.  Shadowy lines hover behind the actual as beacons or footprints.  Ink drawings, reminiscent of ancient cave drawings, indicate the inception of thought and movement.  Abstract black and white photographs of found bones allude to structure, life, and an archeological excavation for hidden meanings.   There are simplicity and strength in their starkness.  The exhibition also includes complex hanging sculptures with line and objects embedded into dense surfaces.  In all the presented artworks, Hart examines the dichotomies of movement and stillness, contemplation and decision, and space and line, and the importance of the duality in the search. 

“Line represents journey, connections, strength, simplicity, scars, tethers, and choice.  Knots can be entanglements, junctures, bindings, obstacles, hurdles, gates and coupling. 

I learned suture knots from my plastic surgeon father. His knots would both join and conceal.”

Hart delves into the tension between the search and choice, and ultimately, personal accountability.  “We are bound by the choices we make.  In the end, my search and its discoveries are all up to me.”