In Chinese painting, it’s not so much the marks you look at, as the way the energy moves around those marks. That space is empty, empty but full. If I think of my marks as traces of myself, then maybe what I’m doing is emptying out. I'm looking for what happens in the flow around me – and seeing painting as a dynamic, a form of energy, a movement score.
About Ghost Stories
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.
Making art is a conjuring process – or rather, it’s ghost whispering or something like that. In the studio, I stand between two paintings I’ve made. The one behind me is on canvas and it’s pinned to the wall. The one I’m holding up in front of me is on translucent gauze. Across the room, there’s a camera on a tripod and it’s set to take pictures at a slow shutter speed. As I move, the lines blur and the shapes they make change. My body disappears to make way for something else.
About the performance paintings
Think of it as calligraphy or writing, which in Chinese tradition is an active, physical and repetitive practice. Cosmic energy, or qi, comes down through the body and out through the hand and the brush. I simply eliminate the hand and the brush. I make these paintings by dipping my torso into liquid paint and then rubbing it down the side of the canvas. Between each stroke, I crouch down into the paint, where I can center myself before reaching up and leaving another trace.
Fergus McCaffrey’s 2022 PRESS RELEASE:
“All my work centers around painting as performance, as an act that brings with it the artist’s whole body.” —Katy Martin
Katy Martin’s commitment to the embrace and employ of her body is an act of defiance akin to Carolee Schneemann’s feminist critiques of action painting; Schneemann was an artist Martin knew personally and certainly saw perform—tense events about which the artist has remarked, “Few people talk about the sound of Carolee’s performance, the friction that slapping of movement could have on the people in the room.” This figure onto ground act mirrors (inspires) Martin’s own action—smearing her freshly painted body onto paper or canvas, sometimes publicly, often privately; then photographing and printing the residual impressions. To integrate painting, photography and performance is evident in the gallery’s downstairs exhibition of Matthew Barney, Carolee Schneemann, Kazuo Shiraga, Min Tanaka; Martin’s mission is more overtly addressing the ramification of painting’s act—specifically abstract expressions conducted through the dimension of time. The pushing and pulling of painted forms manifests a sense of ephemerality in a gestural abstraction rooted in both east and west postwar conventions. Here, every moment of movement leaves a mark on the surface where Martin has orchestrated a phantasmagory of strokes hovering in visual and physical space.
The gallery is delighted to present a selection of Martin’s paintings on the second floor of our Chelsea space, Tuesday, March 15 through Saturday, April 2—in conjunction with Barney, Schneemann, Shiraga, Tanaka on the ground floor. A reception and public performance by Martin will be held on Wednesday, March 30, 6–8pm, at Fergus McCaffrey.
Anthology Film Archives’ 2015 PROGRAM NOTES:
“Painter, printmaker, photographer, and filmmaker, Katy Martin’s work moves between mediums with a grace and ease that few artists are able to command. Her work has long centered on the body and choreography, a fascination that one can trace back to her earliest Super 8 movies. Almost all of her films and videos are rooted in tracing an action, whether it be artisans pulling the prints for an edition by Jasper Johns, the movement of a dancer, or the painted skin of the artist herself. Subtle yet distinctive, her films have an elegance and intuitive internal rhythm that will stick with you long after the screening has ended.”
— Andrew Lampert