Edges in Search of Form

Exhibition

The lawn’s flat nature leads your eye to the edges in search of form, and if the edges are not sharp it will not show.

Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to present Edges in Search of Form, Katie Bell’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show is composed of a collective of individual paintings, sculptures, and installation elements that share a common visual language with influences from architecture, the landscape, and Surrealism. The title of the exhibition references the quote above, advice from a gardener on crafting the perfect lawn.

Trained as a painter, Katie Bell’s sculptural practice stems from a rethinking of the painting process in the third dimension. Basic forms and simple found objects act as individual marks within the canvas of space, most evident in Through Line (Grass). The monochrome, matte grass green prisms are assembled together and around, activating space and generating an environment of its own. Pared down to its base attributes, shape, color, scale, and quantity foreground their objectness while their modularity alludes to a whole, greater than the sum of its individual parts. The rigidity and simplicity of the form is contrasted by its color and organic arrangement.

Operating similarly are the Line of Sight paintings, compact forms reduced to its base elements. Their shape, undulating line, softer hues, and subtle change in tones recall landscapes, shifting light, and the passage of time. The opposite wall features an amalgam of fabricated and found objects. In Search of Form is various in material and texture, with components overlapping, weaving, and puncturing the other. The eyes follow the intricacies of their interaction like a visual Rube-Goldberg machine. Or like the futile attempt of some to maintain the length and shape of grass, an exercise in controlling those things in our world that resist.

Reconciliation comes in the form of bird baths. Often found on lawns or backyards where the natural order is kept at bay to the best of one’s ability, they are beacons that welcome natural behavior. Composed of a patchwork of stone-like Corian, Water Table (Bird Bath) melds with the tones of our landscape while standing out in its formality.

Bell’s overall installation illustrates the light and often hard touches of human intervention. Her constructed worlds explore the absurdity of our extreme pursuit in controlling our environment, and ultimately its analogue in art making.

Artist Bio

Katie Bell is an artist originally from Rockford, Illinois (b. 1985). She received her BA from Knox College (Galesburg, IL) in 2008 where she studied fine art and race and gender studies. She graduated in 2011 from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) with an MFA in Painting. Bell has shown her work at a variety of venues including Spencer Brownstone Gallery (New York, NY), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), Hallways Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), Kavi Gupta (Chicago, IL), Knockdown Center (Queens, NY), and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA). Her work has been written about in BOMB Magazine, Whitewaller, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Sculpture Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, and Paper Magazine. She was an artist in residence at both the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Space Program in 2011 and the Dieu Donné Workspace in 2023 in Brooklyn, NY. In 2015, she was awarded a fellowship in painting by the New York Foundation for the Arts and in 2016, by the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship. She also received the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant in 2019. Bell lives and works in New York, NY.