Katherine Colborn
www.katherinecolborn.com
www.katherinecolborn.com
Sabbath Travel, oil on shaped panel, red oak ply wooden benches, 60" x 216" x 11.5" (approximately), 2019
This work is meant to be interactive. Viewers are invited to sit on the benches, which in turn places their viewpoint at the side of the painted panels, which are beveled and sit flush against the wall. This motion and arrangement recalls the action of sitting in public transportation, such as planes or buses, but the oak benches also allude to the common seating in houses of worship, such as those in churches or synagogues. This work invites us to grapple with the paradoxical sensations of both pausing and moving simultaneously, and to consider the strange moment between rest and travel as a spiritual space.
Artist Statement
The Western contemporary culture is one of speed. It is propelled by competition, drive, and production. My studio work is fueled by a desire to gently release stillness and slowness in order to alleviate this consistent pressure. Countering feelings of upheaval and anxiety spurred by late capitalism and global crises, my paintings and installations offer a quiet resistance by encouraging reflections on slowness, transience and domestic life, and by offering literal and figurative space to navigate transition. My practice is a response to my own desire to fix the unfixable—to pin down the fluid concept of the sacred—and it is also born out of desperation for a quiet reckoning of paradox in a world that propels brashness and oversimplification.
Inspired by hermeneutic philosophy and apophatic theology, I find myself swinging between contradictory states of belief, attempting to wrestle the ineffable and inconceivable into language and cognition. I am chasing steadiness in a liminal place that encompasses a simultaneous coming and going. This unnamable experience seems to most often manifest itself in protected spaces, and thus I've been led in my work to themes of threshold and sanctuary. My paintings (and the installations that serve them) create a respite and an entryway. They remind us that painting, in its stillness and imaginative capabilities, allows and teaches us to rest where we do not live.
The Western contemporary culture is one of speed. It is propelled by competition, drive, and production. My studio work is fueled by a desire to gently release stillness and slowness in order to alleviate this consistent pressure. Countering feelings of upheaval and anxiety spurred by late capitalism and global crises, my paintings and installations offer a quiet resistance by encouraging reflections on slowness, transience and domestic life, and by offering literal and figurative space to navigate transition. My practice is a response to my own desire to fix the unfixable—to pin down the fluid concept of the sacred—and it is also born out of desperation for a quiet reckoning of paradox in a world that propels brashness and oversimplification.
Inspired by hermeneutic philosophy and apophatic theology, I find myself swinging between contradictory states of belief, attempting to wrestle the ineffable and inconceivable into language and cognition. I am chasing steadiness in a liminal place that encompasses a simultaneous coming and going. This unnamable experience seems to most often manifest itself in protected spaces, and thus I've been led in my work to themes of threshold and sanctuary. My paintings (and the installations that serve them) create a respite and an entryway. They remind us that painting, in its stillness and imaginative capabilities, allows and teaches us to rest where we do not live.