Kathryn Spence: New Works
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco
October 5 - November 11, 2000
The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of new works by KATHRYN SPENCE.
Kathryn Spence's work explores the relationship between our emotional and physical comfort and the way it relates to our surroundings. Spence's pieces and installations involve the piling, layering, and thus transformation of previously used and cast off materials and encourages us to look at these pieces made from trash, mud, string etc. in a new context.
For this exhibition, Kathryn Spence has created installations that suggest the transformative aspects of sorting, organizing and cleaning. The new installation plays with aspects of scale and the relationship between the real and the made, the specific and the arbitrary, the concrete and the abstract. Amongst the exhibited works will be small squirrels and piles made from various cloths and materials, as well as birds, sparrows and robins made out of street trash, wire and string. In recent past exhibitions, Spence made Mud Animals that were literally coated with layers of dirt from her garden and appeared to be dejected and leaden. The effect is one that elicits both pathos and a sense of humanity. Her created objects are made to look both vulnerable and fragile by her use of ephemeral materials.
KATHRYN SPENCE (b.1963, Stuttgart, Germany) received her M.F.A. from Mills College in 1993. She has participated in such recent exhibitions as "Of the Moment: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection", at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "Skin-Deep: Surface and Appearance in Contemporary Art", at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, The 1999 Biennial Exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach and "Present Tense: Nine Artists in the Nineties" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Kathryn Spence had her first solo museum exhibition at The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999, and will have a solo show at The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Spring 2001.
STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.wirtzgallery.com
