MA IN STUDIO ART
THESIS EXHIBITION
KATIE BELL

My paintings wrestle with the tension between public and private life. I am enamored by the atmosphere of clubs: spaces that feel grimy, deafening, and lit by neon lights. Sweating bodies are pushed together, forcing intimacy despite the anonymity offered by these spaces. The recurring figure in my work is typically depicted alone in quiet, intimate settings, caught in a moment of privacy. My work explores the contradictions that emerge from these ideas and carry over to my process: what is hidden and what is visible, what is fast and what is slow, what is dense and what is light. I paint quickly to imbue energy into the surfaces, attempting to achieve the feeling of a moment being charged with electricity. I also paint slowly and with many layers to allow for information to build up and the surfaces to gather meaning over time.

I start my work by generating footage of myself dancing in a staged, club-like environment, incorporating strobe lights and a green screen. Through this performance I play with the tension between what is revealed and obscured by selectively exposing my face, stomach, or legs. Layering the video footage also lends to this obfuscation. As an artist, I have always grappled with the idea of looking and being seen. The urge to be vulnerable and to bare my body and soul to an audience is made more comfortable by the fact that I have the power to choose how much is seen. The paintings are slow to reveal themselves—the more one looks at my paintings, the more that is disclosed.

In the studio, the videos serve as loose reference material for painting, allowing me to shift my attention and carefully consider formal elements and the materiality of oil paint. Color emerges as the most prominent element of the work, pushing and pulling the boundaries of the figure and disorienting the space she inhabits. I am invested in the task of pulling light and glow from dirty and muddy paint. I situate murky colors such as grays and browns alongside saturated colors and allow them to enliven each other. I want the paintings not to be bright, but rather to glow from within. I am excited by the collision of material explorational and digital ephemera, and seek to give them both a space within my work.