Both and All, But None Too Bright - an installation of work generated over the last two years, while living and working between New York City, rural Missouri and Los Angeles.
The title of this solo exhibition takes its name from a poem which uses language as a structure by which to engage the resonant harmonic of communication between entities within a landscape.
The exhibition was an installation throughout Grace Exhibition comprised of video, including documentation of “field experiments” and studies that have their roots in the wanderings in the woods of Harding’s upbringing. These studies occur in rural Missouri, New York City, as well as the Salton Sea located in the Mojave Desert of California, and result in video work as well as sculptural drapery, drawing, paintings and photography. In one instance, using her background in garment-making Harding devises systems of patternmaking that make solid drapery and fold of space and time.
As part of the installation, Harding was in residence at Grace during open hours for a limited edition of consultation within a structure built specifically for such an exchange at this site. “Distraction/Discipline” consultations varied durationally and dimensionally.
Also:
"Omne ignotum pro magnifico: Kate Harding in conversation with Dana Osburn,"
A conversation was had on Sunday, 7/20, 11am-12pm which took place outside of Grace in the laundromat across the street. The conversation could be viewed from the second floor at Grace looking out of the windows, while the sound of the conversation is heard through speakers installed inside the exhibition space.
Only a few days prior to the July 23rd premier of Osburn’s film “A Study in Hot Sauce” at Tribeca Cinemas in New York, NY, Kate and Dana discussed deduction, fan culture and perceptual reciprocity, the idea of dispursion in the digital age and the perils of over-explanation. The duration for the conversation was one wash/dry cycle. For more information on Dana Osburn and Dollar Bowling Projects: http://www.dollarbowling.com
For additional info: kateharding.la@gmail.com
Additional Artist Statement below.
* * *
“But Peter, how do we get to Neverland?”
“Fly, of course.”
“Fly?!”
“It’s easy. All you have to do is to…is to…is…to… HA, that’s funny.”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you know?”
“Oh sure. It’s just that I’ve never thought about it before.”
-Excerpt from a conversation between Peter Pan and Wendy Darling
When I was a small child and came across the movie Peter Pan for the first time, everything made sense. I had forgotten how to fly. Flying in “Peter Pan” served as a metaphor for those perceptions that left me beyond the edge of my verbal vocabulary and, for a large part, continue to elude my explanation. I felt that, now that I knew again, all should be unlocked.
Walking through the woods and fields, there was a palpable sensation of having company, or an electric resonance that assured me there was something just out of my sight, so I went looking for “them” which I thought of as “my friends.” My inclination was that if I could see things differentiated from the woods, it would articulate a source and explain things. I assumed I walked amongst things (my friends) hiding from me, precisely because I had forgotten how to see them. Peter Pan became my explanation and “flying” would be remembering.
Because I couldn’t fly and couldn’t find “my friends” I was unable to “remember” and I put great effort into searching my mind for a memory of a memory that I would recognize. In that time, one of the devastations of my life defined itself as the inability to will myself into flight.
* * *
There are fairy tales and there is philosophy, theory, written and recorded history, thoughts and postulations, and also knowledge that is unspoken—things that go unsaid; things that are understood through pragmatics or gesture; things taken in from one’s surroundings as an extension of one’s self, perhaps as survival, or as familial engagement amongst kin of sorts. Then, there is the knowledge that is only said, recorded in repeated utterances over generations, across species and categories. Knowledge comes in many forms: articulated in words, or felt and intuited.
The engagement with the perceptual and the reciprocal resonance amongst things in a landscape is central to my practice. My corporeal sensorial engagement is key. My subjective acting and sensing self [embodied perception] is my point of departure, but not to be privileged over other entities. Site and specificity locate my practice within direct corporeal experience. My interest is to show that this investment in the directly felt affect can engage ideas beyond the concrete, as well as what is held within them.
Kate Harding, 2014
Geronimi, Clyde(Dir), Disney, Walt(Prod), Jackson, Wilfred, and Luske, Hamilton, Bobby Driscoll and Kathryn Beaumont(Perf). Peter Pan. Walt Disney Studios/ RKO Pictures, 1953.