Pictures

Osmos is pleased to present artist Kate Steciw's first solo show with the gallery. Kate Steciw’s practice is defined by a “continual effort to cope with the perceptual crisis precipitated by image overload” (Steciw). She is drawn to forgotten, authorless or “weak” images; the stock image used to signify anything from foot health to dish soap, images from Facebook Marketplace and special interest groups and the vast stores of her own personal images saved and resaved for reasons unknown over decades. Whether she’s working with editing software or by hand, Steciw layers and juxtaposes seemingly disparate images to create works she refers to as “composites” and that remain uncomfortably uncontained by categories such as photograph, painting, or sculpture. Steciw’s practice is reminiscent of a previous generation of artists that were engaged with a perceived crisis of representation in the mid-1970s and created knowing, often ironic, markers of referentiality and representation, a process that has since become synonymous with the shorthand of postmodernism. In the titular essay for his exhibition “Pictures”, staged at Artists Space in 1977, Douglas Crimps posited that for artists such as Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Troy Brauntuch, and Jack Goldstein, that crisis was the onset of image saturation through film and television. For Crimp, “[t]hose processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging that constitute the strategies of the work … necessitate uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.” Steciw’s works operate in a similar mode: as interventions into an overwhelming stream of images. Her gestures, not unlike those of the graffiti artist or cave painter, are an assertion of agency in an otherwise vast and unpredictable environment. She intervenes to liberate herself, and the image from a prescribed context or convention and to propose new possibilities for interaction both between images as well as between images and their consumers/viewers. Central is a desire to materialize the immaterial. Steciw’s recent works of collaged canvas prints return this gesture to the physical realm. Large scale works are created using photographs culled from a range of online sources and of widely different resolutions. The images are printed on canvas and collaged onto wood panels using as few “moves” as possible. These works resist the complexity and density often associated with collage. Instead, they hinge on restraint. The scale and surface give weight to images that might otherwise be fleeting or disposable, inviting viewers to consider how meaning shifts when images are removed from their original context and forced into dialogue. Decidedly “hand-made”, the works bear traces of their digital origins (a pixelated fragment, the hard circular edge of the “rubber stamp” tool) but further reduce the origins of any given image to irrelevance; what remains is the work’s ability to serve as a disorienting reference to something inevitably absent while creating a physical object that operates visually; a Picture. Kate Steciw holds a BA from Smith College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Steciw has exhibited extensively in New York in group exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, Hauser & Wirth, The Macro Museum in Rome, and the Museo Capodimonte in Naples, Italy. She has had solo exhibitions at Higher Pictures Gallery (New York), Christophe Gaillard Gallery (Paris), Brand New Gallery (Milan), Neumeister BarAm (Berlin), Annarumma Gallery (Naples), and Levy Delval (Brussels). Her work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, and Interview magazine. Steciw lives and works in upstate New York.