Kate Breakey, Julie Saul Gallery, New York - Small Deaths Exhibition

Kate Breakey: Small Deaths 
Julie Saul Gallery, New York
March 15 - April 21, 2001 

The Julie Saul Gallery presents Australian born artist Kate Breakey’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition includes a selection of large painted photographs of birds from the series Small Deaths with works from 1997 to the present. Kate Breakey describes her interest in "these individual creatures...little representatives of all the lives and deaths that we disregard." She is concerned with expressing a reverence for nature and life. The dead things that she finds or is given, plant, fowl, reptile and mammal, possess a fundamental spirit beyond the shell that is left behind. In collecting and examining these "small deaths" she invokes the role of the naturalist and artist. Her titles which are inscribed on the print provide the Latin scientific taxonomy, followed by the popular name. Kate Breakey enters the realm of text and image, and references the nineteenth century practice of assembled collections of specimens into natural history collections.

Like the photogenic drawings of Henry Fox Talbot, Kate Breakey’s coloration varies considerably from the reddish tones to the pale grays, lemons and lilacs. Her use of transparent photographic oils and pencil, subtlety applied to a toned gelatin silver print, create lush soft focused surfaces and depths. The large scale format of the images monumentalizes the seemingly small bearing of her subjects and furthers the commemoration of their fugitive aspect.

From early Daguerrean funerary portraits, the pictorialist acceptance of the classic subjects like cemeteries, or the nature morte and vanitas traditions in art, these still life’s of dead birds are allegorical novellas. The depiction and interpretation of death’s presence whether for documentary or expressive purposes conciliates a vision of self with more than the nullity of death.

A monograph of Kate Breakey’s work will be published in October of 2001 by the University of Texas Press and her work is included in the collections of Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego and numerous private collections.

JULIE SAUL GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.saulgallery.com