Katie Bell: Backsplash

Locust Projects present “Backsplash“, two new site-specific works by Brooklyn-based artist Katie Bell.

Bell has mined Miami for the items that form the palette for the works that she has created in Locust Projects’ front and back spaces. She uses common building materials as ingredients to be sawn, cut, thrown, stacked, and coerced together. Utilizing wood, laminate, paint, foam, hot tub fragments, shock absorbers, cork, and rope, the artist has created physical, sculptural paintings.

The exhibition’s title refers to the location itself, as Locust Projects’ walls and floors act as painting “supports”, in that they have collected –and now exhibit – the detritus of Bell’s activity within the space. Large objects that evoke the domestic sphere have been transformed into painterly elements. The artist’s materials become abstracted from their original purpose, and act as ruins and relics.

Bell’s works act as still life paintings that threaten to rupture the viewer’s space. They give the impression that the artist’s materials have been through an unusual storm, which has left them strewn about the space in a state of freeze-frame, as if holding their breath until the viewer leaves.

About the artist:
Originally from Rockford, Illinois, Katie Bell (b. 1985) received her BA from Knox College where she studied fine art and race and gender studies. She graduated in 2011 from the Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA in Painting. Bell has shown at venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Knockdown Center (Brooklyn, NY); Nudashank (Baltimore); PLUG Projects (Kansas City); Okay Mountain Gallery (Austin); and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA). Her work has received coverage in BOMB Magazine, Art F City, Hyperallergic, and Paper Magazine. In 2011 she was an artist in residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Space Program. Bell was recently awarded a fellowship in painting by the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship. Bell lives and works in Brooklyn. This is her first exhibition in Miami.