Artist: Kate Newby



Exhibition title: I memorized it I loved it so much



Venue: Laurel Gitlen, New York, US



Date: June 26 – July 31, 2015



Photography: images courtesy of the artist and Laurel Gitlen, New York



Laurel Gitlen is proud to present the first US solo exhibition of the New Zealand, New York- based artist Kate Newby. Working with a variety of media including installation, textile, ce- ramics, casting and glass, Newby is a sculptor who is committed to exploring and putting pressure on the limits and nature of sculpture. As such, she is interested in not only space, volume, texture and materials, but where and how sculpture happens. Varying in scale, works are liable to take place fugaciously, as in the case of her ceramic skipping stones which she asks people to skip and have themselves photographed doing so, on the street in a given city, as in her concrete, poured puddles, or in the gallery proper, in subtly, but no- ticeably present architectural disruptions of the space itself. In every case the work bears a strong link to not just the every day, but to the lived– it wants to experience as much as it generates experience, collecting and registering the traces of the passing world, which it incorporates and is incorporated into. It is for this reason that if the handmade plays a very important role in what she does; not merely romantic or even retrograde, it is rather the aesthetic byproduct of a position that shamelessly embraces direct experience over the mediated. Indeed, winsomely frank, Newby’s work wields a disarming familiarity, which is not unlike like seeing an old friend who starts the conversation by saying: “Tell me about yourself.”

For her exhibition at Laurel Gitlen, Newby presents a broad variety of works including an architectural intervention, which manifests through a wooden platform, an alteration of the gallery’s lighting, and a rope snaking through the gallery. Other works include a rock, a ceramic wind chime as well as a new glass wind chime, a concrete puddle, a postcard piece, and other elements.

–Chris Sharp, June 2015

Kate Newby, I memorized it I loved it so much will be on view at the gallery from June 26–July 31, 2015. Her work has been presented internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Lulu, Mexico City (2014); La Loge, Brussels (2014); Fogo Island Gallery, Newfoundland (2013); and Hopkinson Mossmon, Auckland (2013).

Ah be with me always, 2015

The more I listen to it the more I love it., 2015

Our striped T shirts and shorts., 2015

Our striped T shirts and shorts., 2015

I memorized it I loved it so much, 2015

Always humming, always shifting a little., 2015

I memorized it I loved it so much, 2015 (detail)

I memorized it I loved it so much, 2015

I memorized it I loved it so much, 2015

I memorized it I loved it so much, 2015

I memorized it I loved it so much, 2015 (detail)