Kate Barbee at Kohn Gallery
Written by Lindsay Preston Zappas
A new exhibition of paintings by Kate Barbee abandons the precious sanctity of the canvas. In rosy paintings, figures swirl and mingle, limbs jut out at impossible angles. Just as her figures are deconstructed in a pseudo-Cubist style, her paintings too are cut apart and then stitched back together. The artist approaches each new work with a bevy of older “failed paintings” that she repurposes into her new compositions, cutting each piece along the silhouette of each painted head or potted plant. With embroidery thread, Barbee sutures old onto new, collapsing imagery to create textural tapestries. The embroidery thread encircling each painting scrap is applied in neat rows, creating dashed patterning across each painting that draws the eye in and out of Barbee’s lush painted scenes. During this very, ahem, domestic-focused year, many of us have become all too familiar with our own inhabited spaces and much of Barbee’s paintings focus on domestic space — house plants and plush couches mill about her floating figures. In the largest work in the show, “Nesting” an interior life plays out across the canvas, with little scenes quilted together to build into a narrative tableau. Various rooms of a house are depicted along with a female figure lounging within warm hues and floral details. “I’ve started to really notice my chairs and daydream about architecture, occupying my nest,” Barbee told me.
I asked Barbee about her process of repurposing old paintings. She explained that the process begins with “a canvas that will be a painting, a canvas that is meant for a freehanded study, and then a bad painting that never makes on its own.” She said that while sometimes these “bad paintings” are made intentionally, for repurposing into a larger work, she also has found “new energy and creativity from propelling these ‘mistake’ paintings into something new. I don’t let go in the sense of throwing something away, but I am able to cut and reimagine freely to keep my mind open.” As she begins a new work, Barbee often consults her own surroundings, pulling imagery from iPhone photos or books. “Writing in my journal every day is a documentary of the emotion and minutia of my world… As the bard of my little world, what I end up showing is the highlights and feelings more than historical accuracy and deflated reality.” She describes her journals, phone pictures, and painting scraps as “wet paint, half-formed palates I can piece together to fill out the vision.”