Katie Holten & Friends
19 May – 14 Jul. 2017
*1975 Dublin
lives and works in New York City
Language is unique to humans. It creates order, allows us to enter distant, or non-existent worlds. Holten – recognizing a failure of language and a crisis of representation as our species adapts to life in the Anthropocene – created a Tree Alphabet and published the book About Trees. Further the drawings of the series “Pussy Alphabet” consist of an army of little “femlins” from which the artist created a font, that can be also downloaded from her website. Katie Holten’s work often consists of recycled materials, with maps, plants and a variety of ecological topics as the starting point for her work. Since the 1990s, Holten has explored the limits of Western ideas on the notions of “nature” and “the environment” and explored the boundaries between man-made structures and organic systems, drawings, sculptures, printed matter, and public art that blurred in the Anthropocene. This thematic exploration of the Anthropocene happens impressively quiet in delicate drawings and sculptures of branches and plants, which could implode at any moment. Katie Holten’s unique commitment to her themes finds the most tangible expression in the overlapping of social activism and art production manifested in public art projects such as the Tree Museum, the Resistance Project or her resistance walks.
KATIE HOLTEN | GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
19 May – 14 Jul. 2017
9 Nov. – 21 Dec. 2013
11 Jun. – 17 Jul. 2010
13 Jan. – 3 Mar. 2007
15 Jul. – 25 Aug. 2005