Artist Talk: Cicely Carew and Kate Holcomb Hale at LaiSun Keane, SoWa
When:
Wednesday, May 25, 2022 6:00p -
7:30p
Wednesday, May 25, 2022 6:00p -
7:30p
Where:
LaiSun Keane
460C Harrison Avenue C8A
Boston, MA 02118
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Art
Event website:
https://www.laisunkeane.com/cicelycarewandkareholcombhale
Cicely Carew and Kate Holcomb Hale
Is It Wednesday Yet?
May 6 - 29, 2022
Artist Conversation and demo with moderator, LEAH TRIPLETT HARRINGTON
Wednesday May 25, 2022, 6:00-7:30 pm
RSVP: [email protected]
Both trained in paper-based processes (printmaking and drawing), Cicely Carew and Kate Holcomb Hale take the dexterity of their hands into large-scale sculptural and graphic installation that defies strict categorization. Both artists are intensely physical with their work, the mark of their hand apparent throughout their surfaces but also in the structures that uphold them. In other words, their mark making makes their compositions, and their gestures make their construction. Is It Wednesday Yet?, the pair’s first presentation together, articulates this constant becoming (or un-coming) and betweenness (or preciseness). Throughout, the work installed at LaiSun Keane dances between dimensions, scale, color, and material. Here, Carew and Holcomb Hale demonstrate a faculty with installation as a mode of being, becoming, and being between.
The collaborative centerpiece of Is It Wednesday Yet?, created over several all-day, midweek work sessions, exemplifies this approach. Conceived as a painting, this large-scale installation is a dialogue of mark-making that the two made intuitively. Starting with large sheets of yupo paper (an expendable surface that can be used for many processes, techniques, and materials) laid on Carew’s studio floor, Carew and Holcomb Hale convene with the surface and their gestures, coming in and out of making, balancing creation with day-to-day responsibilities of living and mothering (both have young sons). The results are a lyrical essay in brushwork and line all spelled out in washes of saturated color. This work is not meant to hold or say just one thing, however; installed in the gallery, this work incorporates the many worlds, aesthetic and otherwise, that coalesce in the pair’s individual works.
Leah Triplett Harrington is a curator, writer, and editor. As curator for Now + There she facilitates the Public Art Accelerator and organizes large-scale public art commissions, most recently What Do We Have in Common? by Janet Zweig, Ambrosia by Cicely Carew, The Shape of Play by Sari Carel, and ¡Provecho! by Justin Favela. She is also a founding editor of publication and platform The Rib and editor-at-large for Boston Art Review. Her writing has most recently appeared in those publications and Sculpture, Public Art Dialogue, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, WBUR’s The Artery, Big Red & Shiny, and The Brooklyn Rail. As an independent curator, she has organized projects for Boston University Art Galleries, Trestle Gallery, Herter Gallery, and others. In 2021, she was the inaugural curatorial mentor for Praise Shadows Art Gallery and taught in the MFA program in Painting at Boston University.
