Kate Gilmore: In Your Way | Performance-based videos
PERFORMANCE-BASED VIDEOS BY KATE GILMORE AT LAFAYETTE COLLEGE’S GROSSMAN GALLERY ARE METAPHORS FOR CHALLENGES WOMEN FACE CULTURALLY AND SOCIALLY
Lafayette College Art Galleries presents “Kate Gilmore: In Your Way,” an exhibition of nine performance-based videos through November 17 at the Richard A. & Rissa W. Grossman Gallery located at the Williams Visual Arts Building, 243 North Third Street, Easton, Pa.
Grossman Gallery will host a “meet the artist” event and reception with Kate Gilmore on Monday, September 24, at 4:10 p.m.
The exhibition and related programs are free and open to the public.
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Kate Gilmore synthesizes multiple mediums including performance, video, sculpture, and painting. Kate Gilmore: In Your Way features nine performance-based videos that focus on the artist or several women, wearing stereotypical feminine clothing and footwear while persistently performing difficult, labor-intensive tasks within self-constructed spaces.
According to catalogue essayist Amy Smith-Stewart, “The videos, performances, and sculptures of Kate Gilmore forge relational encounters that rearrange our thinking about structures of power. Gilmore’s protagonists, exclusively female, and within the videos, almost always herself, attack the ways in which we perceive gendered notions of strength, authority and control in our social arena.”
Gilmore critiques and also inserts herself into male dominated movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, exploring feminist themes and modern and contemporary art tropes, all the while exhibiting relentless determination. The spilling and splattering in the videos are an ode to Abstract Expressionism or 1950s stripe paintings. Her works are mischievous and political, as well as humorous and critical of the heroic language and absence of women in these artistic movements. The physical situations and actions Gilmore creates for herself and her performers are metaphors for challenges women face culturally and socially.
Some of the noted videos in this exhibition include: Gilmore’s performance My Love is an Anchor, 2004, in which the artist is urgently attempting to remove her foot from a bucket of hardening plaster with a hammer; Standing Here, 2010, which features Gilmore in a red-and-white polka dot dress, black gloves, and black heels, punching and kicking her way through a sheetrock and plywood enclosure; and Sudden as a Massacre, 2013, featuring five female performers wearing matching floral print sun dresses who, using only their hands, tear apart a huge cube of wet clay, and hurl it by the fistful at the surrounding yellow wall and floor.
An illustrated exhibition catalogue with essay, “Kate Gilmore Workwomen,” by Amy Smith-Stewart is available.
The exhibition was organized by the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine
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About the artist:
Kate Gilmore was born in Washington D.C. in 1975 and lives and works in New York, N.Y. Gilmore received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, N.Y. (2002) and her bachelor’s degree from Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (1997). Gilmore is Associate Professor of Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, N.Y.
She has participated in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y.; The Moscow Biennial, Moscow, Russia (2011); PS1 Greater New York, MoMA/PS1, New York, N.Y. (2005 and 2010); in addition to solo exhibitions at The Everson Museum, Syracuse, N.Y.; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn. (2014); MoCA Cleveland, Ohio (2013); Public Art Fund, Bryant Park, New York, N.Y. (2010); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pa. (2008); and Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2006).
She has been the recipient of international awards and honors such as the ArtPrize 7/Juror’s Grand Prize, Grand Rapids, Mich. (2015); Rauschenberg Residency Award, Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Fla. (2014); Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2007/2008); The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Award, New York, N.Y. (2009/2010); Art Matters Grant, New York, N.Y. (2012); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Award for Artistic Excellence, New York, N.Y. (2010); the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, New York, N.Y. (2006); “In the Public Realm,” Public Art Fund, New York, N.Y. (2010); The LMCC Workspace Residency, New York, N.Y. (2005); New York Foundation for The Arts Fellowship, New York, N.Y. (2012 and 2005); and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Residency, Brooklyn, N.Y. (2010).
Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y.; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Calif.; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Ind.; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Ill.
Additional information can be found at: http://www.kategilmore.com/projects
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Lafayette is located in Easton, Pennsylvania, on the scenic Delaware River, 72 miles from New York City, and 60 miles from Philadelphia.
For more information and gallery hours, visit the art galleries’ website: galleries.lafayette.edu.
Easton is served by Trans-Bridge Lines, a commuter bus from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
For more information, contact: Michiko Okaya, director of art galleries, artgallery@lafayette.edu, 610 330 5361 or Jennifer Philburn, philburj@lafayette.edu; visit galleries.lafayette.edu or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
All gallery lectures and exhibitions are free and open to the public. They are sponsored by Lafayette Art Galleries.
Lafayette College Art Galleries and EPI receive state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Images:
Left: video still, Kate Gilmore, A Roll in the Way, 2014, video/installation, 92:36 minutes
Center Left: video still from Kate Gilmore, Pot, Kettle, Black, video, 5:40 minutes
Center Right: video still from Kate Gilmore: Buster, 2011, video/installation, 7:45 minutes,
Right: video still from Kate Gilmore, Sudden as a Massacre, 2011
High resolution images are available at https://flic.kr/s/aHskE3YiDk through Hightail or WeTransfer by request.