BOOK / exhibition catalog

KATY MARTIN - Ghost Stories
with an essay by Richard Kalina
(see below)

This book is structured like an experimental film, where the images tell a story –
in an abstract kind of way.

Published on the occasion of the 2-person exhibition
Ghosts In the Garden: Bill Brand & Katy Martin
Court Tree Collective
Brooklyn, New York
June 14 - July 19, 2025

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts and painting on silk gauze as a kind of second skin. Ghosts, like painting, have a long and storied history of avoiding normal pathways and emerging through walls. Also, like painting, they reveal themselves differently, depending on the moment and how open you are. Then, too, they can vanish ... or were they just an illusion? They can vanish before your eyes can focus on what you see.

— Katy Martin

THE GHOST AND THE MACHINE

by Richard Kalina

Katy Martin's new inkjet works on either paper or canvas, Ghost Stories, would seem, at first glance, to be straightforward examples of today's advanced gestural painting. They are colorful, lively, well-constructed but uncluttered, evocative, and carefully executed; bringing to mind Willem de Kooning's now highly regarded last body of abstractions of the mid-1980s. But just as those uncharacteristically spare de Koonings (misunderstood at first) revealed unexpected layers and complexities, so do Katy Martin's works. Key to this is their conscious blur, their loss of focus and specificity. This is not due, as is the case with the blurred paintings of Gerhard Richter, to painterly manipulations of the flat surface of the canvas, manipulations which purposely reference the degradation of photomechanical reproduction (particularly when applied to fraught historically-embedded images). Rather, Martin's blurrings are the effects of a complex layered process that combines painting, performance, photography, and printmaking. These works function as amalgams of two and three-dimensionality, held in place by time-based actions, both mechanical and body-centered.

There are three distinct physical layers involved in the creation of these works. The first is a colorful and loosely painted white gessoed canvas, covered in a series of roughly concentric circles laid out in a relaxed but packed and jostling grid. The circles are energetically painted in bright acrylic colors – sharp reds, golden yellows, and leaf greens, interlaced with thinner, graphically strong black lines. This canvas serves as the back, foundational layer. The third and outermost layer is a thin, semi-transparent gauze cloth painted with curving linear elements in black (and sometimes colored) ink and acrylic. The gauze layer is more spatially open than the canvas one – there are fewer lines, and of course you can see through the material. The second, middle layer is the unclothed body of the artist herself, whose pinkness, modulated by the white of the gauze adds another chromatic layer to the mix. Key to the whole process is the camera, which clicks off regularly as the artist holds the gauze in front of her and moves in precisely choreographed motions, changing the mix of what is seen and what is hidden. Rather than completely stopping motion, as is normally the case with the pictures we take, the artist sets the shutter to a particularly slow speed, --.8 second, creating a photographically-induced blur, a machine-generated indeterminacy.

The blurred forms do not freeze the image, rather they lock in the process of movement. We see early 20thcentury antecedents to this in Italian Futurist painting and photography (especially evident in the photographic work of the Bragaglia brothers). In Futurism, movement was key – implying the highly valued qualities of dynamism and progress. While we are no longer convinced that social progress can be directly tied to aesthetic process, the Futurist desire to transcend the traditional spatial limits of two-dimensional work or the implicit stasis of sculpture is still something important to reckon with. The age-old problem of creating the illusion of volume in two-dimensional work, particularly painting, has typically been solved by grading color or tone to simulate the play of light across solid forms, by employing perspectival devices or by exploiting the optical properties of advancing or receding colors. Katy Martin solves this in another way – creating volume by showing portions of a human body set in a bounded, shallow three-dimensional space, placed both in front of and behind two-dimensional painted surfaces -- the whole mix of superimposed forms melded and fused by a mechanical imaging process. The goal seems to be not greater clarity, but rather a more evocative ambiguity – an ambiguity of volume and color only partially attached to depicted form, just as a ghost – in these Ghost Stories – is a spectral entity that gets its power by echoing the body it once inhabited.

This ambiguity extends to nomenclature. Just what are these things and where are they situated? Are they paintings, drawings, records of performance and process, photographs, prints, stand-alone objects or serial images? All of the above, or something else? Are they abstract or figurative, conceptual or perceptual, literary or literal, images or actions? For all of their appealing physicality, they are slippery and hard to grasp. Which of course leads us to the inevitable non-answer: interesting art asks us interesting questions. This is the kind of art that keeps you guessing, but most importantly, keeps you looking.

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