Katie Bethune-Leamen
Shallow
Featuring: The Temporary Katie Centre for Katie’s Art
For her exhibition Shallow, Katie Bethune-Leamen created an entire body of work, in a variety of medias, seemingly devoid of original imagery and subject matter, personal symbolism or any particular emotion or intimacy that might reveal her individuated indentity. While each of the five series presented addresse specific issues and concerns, her vocabulary is derived from product logos, comic book figures and other recognisable symbols from our western, consumer driven culture.
In the inkjet printout series Scenes from The End (1997) images of light flashes explode against impossibly bright coloured backgrounds evoking transcendence and revelation. Odd titles such as Brown Glow - Honey Rice Krispies clue the viewer to the fact that these images are designs for the backgrounds of cereal boxes. The initial optimistic promise of the images collapses into emptiness, effectively mimicing marketing strategies used to sell nutritionally useless food products.
Office trailer arranged in the exhibition space
For the Danger series (1997), which Bethune-Leamen considers drawings, tiny adhesive transfer stickers of comic books figures have simply been affixed, unaltered, to sheets of drawing paper. This startingly direct appropriation (or is it called sampling these days?) boldly calls into question traditional notions of authorship, originality and the ownership of images made specifically for mass consumption.
Bethune-Leamen twists the strategy of appropriation in another series of untitled drawings (1997) by drawing, with her own hand in pencil and gouache, well-known cartoon characters such as Pinnochio, Aylmer the Elephant and Goofy. Unexpectedly and humourously, these lovable little characters sport a variety of genital piercings implying that their pervasive presence in childhood conciousness may have deeper connotations than advertised.
Étude pour Post-Modernisme, 1997
photographie couleur
References to the mind and body as potential sites of commodification are also apparent in a two-part video piece entitled The Cat Tattoo Project (1996-). In a corner of the gallery a video monitor documents the artist's shoulder being tattooed with a generic cartoon cat image in 1996, and a video projection on the wall beside it shows the tattoo being burned by a laser treatment one year later. Bethune-Leamen humourously and quite viscerally pokes fun at the media-driven trendiness behind the current tattoo and body-piercing fad.
The various thematic tangents in the show are consolidated in the exhibition's main feature: the audaciously titled Temporary Katie Centre for Katie's Art. Here visitors are invited to enlist in a one day residency in a portable construction-site trailer parked in the gallery's loading bay. Participants are provided with a selection of art supplies and images from Katie's repertoire and encouraged to produce artworks based on her imagery - which, after all, is imagery appropriated from popular culture. However, as participants become immersed in the exercice they begin to engage with their own relationship to the subject matter.
To make room for individuality amidst the clamour of our media-saturated, consumerized society it is necessary to negociate the shallow surfaces of popular culture before plunging into deeper regions of one's own psyche.
David Liss
| formation | ||
| 1990 |  |
Pre-College Certificate, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC |
| 1996 | BFA with distinction, major in art history and studio art, Concordia University, Montréal, QC |
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| expositions | ||
| 1999 | Main d'Oeuvre, Usine Éphémère, Paris, FR | |
| 1997 | Shallow, Quartier Éphémère, Montreal, QC | |
| 1996 | Production, V.A.V. Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, QC Season's Greetings, Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal, QC Made, Quartier Éphémère, Montreal, QC Middlesex University Print Exhibition, Middlesex University, Middlesex, UK The Big Print Show, Isart, Montreal, Qc |
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