Katy Stone and Yvette Molina: "Tickling Thicket" at Johansson Projects
Art LTD Magazine
By David M. Roth
January 2009
You can take issue with Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulacra - the idea that contemporary life simulates "authentic" experience - but simulations, as any moviegoer will attest, are often highly engaging. That's definitely the case with "Tickling Thicket," a provocative exhibit by Katy Stone and Yvette Molina, two painters with very different ideas about representing nature. Stone brushes and pours acrylic paint onto clear sheets of Duralar that she cuts and reassembles into structures that recall terrestrial and aquatic plant life seen through a scrim of mutating cells. These works appear in two formats: framed behind glass like taxidermied specimens, and in complex, multi-layered installations that flow across walls in amoeba-like shapes over which she has superimposed floral forms, in a kind of sculptural version of cell animation minus the storyline.
Stone, who lives and works in Seattle, doesn't spend much time in nature. But she almost certainly fantasizes about it. She works quickly and spontaneously, painting hundreds of forms per day in a monochromatic palette of white, amber and black. These she assembles in improvised installations, creating the convincing illusion that they somehow sprouted organically. Little Universe (Terra), an L-shaped installation, spans 21 linear feet with starburst forms pinned to the wall at various angles to cast shadows through transparent media. It's a macroscopic view of a microscopic phenomenon. Untitled (Thicket Heap) is the exact opposite: a floor-to-ceiling construction in a tiny room that delivers what feels like an ocean-floor view of a kelp bed: a head-spinning tangle of limbs, vines, roots, stalks and tendrils interspersed with flora of indeterminate species. The range of associative possibilities seems almost endless.
In contrast, Molina's oil-on-aluminum paintings are cool, Asian-influenced landscapes whose loose lines and Symbolist lighting effects bypass the obvious clichés of the genre while simultaneously appearing to engage them. While the Oakland painter's large-scale panels are eye-grabbing, they ultimately resist intimacy; whereas her six paintings on 7-inch, convex aluminum disks exert a gyroscopic pull, providing a portal into a watery universe that seems, in pieces like Lichen Whorl and Trembling Rot, to expand, fractal-like, before your eyes.
It's doubtful that either artist is flashing any irony here. Yet the concept of simulacra seems to be embedded, if only because the obvious artifice of their materials contrasts so sharply with the authenticity of the response they elicit. In other words, they become credible destinations, places where you'd want to spend time.
Steel wind at Greg Kucera Gallery
Katy Stone passes on Dura-Lar for laser-cut steel.
Seattle Weekly
By Adriana Grant
January 16, 2008
At Greg Kucera Gallery, wind is made solid by Katy Stone, whose acrylic-on-clear-plastic work you may remember from previous shows here: cascades of intense red or blue falling down layers of transparent Dura-Lar. She shows more work like this--in a softer, more monochrome palette: browns and blacks and nearly all-white pieces. But the most striking piece in this (her third) solo show at Greg Kucera is made not of Dura-Lar but of laser-cut steel. Nearly 11 feet wide by 14½ feet high, this construction, Edge of a World (wind), occupies the back gallery's entire wall. Steel sweeps down in long, curved swathes. A few minimally detailed organic shapes--rough-edged branches with full blossoms--are caught at a 90-degree angle. In steel, Stone's work is more solid and, somehow, more delicate as well. The edges are cut sharply, and instead of paint layered onto a clear ground, the edges pile up, creating a cleaner sculptural work, with strong shadows and a more defined physical presence. Greg Kucera Gallery, 212 Third Ave. S., 624-0770, www.gregkucera.com. Ends Feb. 9
A Big Splash
Cincinnati Magazine
By Kathy S. Wilson
August 2008
Seattle artist Katy Stone must be moved by the oil-on-water and elongated string-cheese shapes formed organically in nature. In her show, Accumulations & Constructions, layer upon layer of painted Duralar-- filmy plastic sheeting-- exposes her fetish. Pieces like White Falls (Serpentine) (above) explode with color and bring to mind shower curtains as waterfalls, while Oil & Water Fall 6 (Bees) evokes the elasticity of rubber cement tears and mimics the tail of some exotic, pre-iPod mammal. She lists
shadowsamong her influences and she's right to do so. How they do go on. -Kathy S. Wilson
Embodiments
Sculpture Magazine
Excerpts from an essay by Chris Schnoor
August 2006
Katy Stone's intensely poetic work is a hybrid of drawing, painting, sculpture and installation in which two and three-dimensional form, color, light, shadow and air movement interact.
Each work is composed from sheets of transparent archival acetate called Duralar, on which she paints organically derived imagery in acrylic using bamboo brushes. Although the pigment may often looked spilled or poured, she practically
drawsonto the acetate, carefully controlling viscosity and opacity, and then gathers and manipulates the various layers into sculptural configurations that suggest a multiplicity of subjects and effects.
Influences of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Abstract Expressionism are distilled through a Post-Minimalist sensibility with its emphasis on process and transitory phenomena. Her work constantly walks a fine line between the representational and the allusive as a number of sets of dualities reside together in each work, sustaining the tension that so animates her art.