Artist of the Day / Katina Huston / Bay Area, California

Finding work like Katina’s is what keeps me going at this.

“It began with a few drawings. I’d find a shadow and set the mylar underneath and draw what I saw. What I saw was a whole new world, utterly familiar, utterly unrecognizable. Ordinary objects cast shadows like space debris. How can a thing be both ‘what the hell?’ and ‘oh sure.’ I was taken. So I spent eight years developing techniques and tools. The drawings are on mylar because, on a transparency, light breathes through the drawing.”

 

“You need light to see your shadow, and Katina Huston uses several lights to cast shadows of everyday objects such as glasses, bicycles and horns. She suspends them from her studio ceiling, then traces their shadows on the floor in ink. Huston’s show at Chase Young Gallery is most enthralling when she is least literal, when her shadows smear and blurt and bubble, and that seems to happen most in her brass section.”

“In her day, Bay Area Artist Katina Huston has worn both the Lycra shorts of a death-defying bike messenger and the chevron-ed robe of a depth defying college professor. For her solo exhibition at the Chase Young Gallery, she’s pulling from both wardrobes with a series of ink on Mylar prints that draws upon Baudrillard, Duchamp, and this one time that this motherfucker in a Hummer didn’t check his blind spot and almost fucking killed her. With a passion for all things velocipede, Huston sketches abstract roadmaps of spokes spider-webbing their way across the page.”

Huston’s process is risky. Each layer is painted separately and must dry before the next overlay is added. The ink is unforgiving and the Mylar allows no erasures or reworking.

http://www.katinahuston.com