Inner Sun
Well Well Projects, September 7 - 29, 2024
My works in Inner Sun touch on the precarity of our entanglements with the more-than-human world. Visually poetic and process-informed, these works meshed photographic images, textures, thick embroidery, text, salt, and fishing lures in a materials assemblage.
“I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…” - Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, London: Andre Deutch.
Documentation by Mario Gallucci
Dandelion
Well Well Projects, March 4-26, 2023
View all works at Print Multi-Media & Spatial Multi-Media
Katherine Spinella's solo exhibition, Dandelion, features a mix of print, image, fabric, light, and altered objects that draw attention to themes of time, aging, and change. Bright signaling colors, insects, stereograms, vegetables, and agricultural symbols highlight the cycles and fragments present in daily life. Inspired by the Greek myth of Persephone and her connection to the seasons, the exhibition underscores the power of holding contrast and its ability to bring depth and meaning to our experiences. Using textured frames, hanging lamps, and celestial hex signs borrowed from the Pennsylvania Dutch folk art tradition creates a sense of intimacy and invites viewers to delve deeper into the emotions that lie beneath the surface of the world. Spinella invites us to contemplate the beauty and complexity of the tangible world and consider the role of fiction and truth in shaping our perception.
Documentation by Mario Gallucci
Where the Future Can Meet
Carnation Contemporary, August 6-28, 2022
With the expansion of digital production in the last 30 years, contemporary images have undergone a metamorphosis where reality plays an even smaller role in artistic development yet images have become more fluid and potent. Once a mirror, a vehicle for expression, or a simple representation of nature, the image no longer relates to reality, rather referring to optics, narrative, marketing, and surveillance.
This linear development of the post-image happened through the porosity of the new media, creating a fluid environment to the detriment of exclusive specificities of the past. So far, the stories created are of advances and setbacks, where the future can meet, cross or rejoin the past. This non-linear way of creating narratives and reality is what Marcelo Fontana and Katherine Spinella seek to understand in Where the Future Can Meet.
Observed through the proliferation of shared 'photo dumps' as contemporary diaries or still-life paintings of the present, images become unspecific personal artifacts. What would the story on the card in the museum read? The more ordinary or unflattering personal present becomes more "real." In this, we engage with hypervisibility as an absurdity for coping with the present. Like a garden walk or watching a fire burn, we crave instances that are non-decisive moments outside spectacle and production.
This collaborative installation by Marcelo Fontana and Katherine Spinella utilizes light, fabric, text, moving, and still image to create a space for reflection on topics of transparency, opacity, grief, and longing centered around post-photographic sentiments.
Exhibition documentation by Mario Gallucci
black hole sun
Carnation Contemporary , September 11 - 26, 2021
Facing the sun (tunnels) review by Lindsay Costello at Oregon Artswatch, Sept. 21, 2021.
Curated by Dr. Jessi DiTillio, the Thunderstruck Collective is a growing group of artists committed to collaborative engagements with the land arts of the American west through exhibitions and publications. Works by Katherine Spinella, Michael E. Stephen, John Whitten, Kristin Hough, Morgan Rosskopf, Ashlin Aronin
Thunderstruck 2.0: black hole sun is the second in a series of exhibitions inspired by journeys to classic land art sites in the American West. For this exhibition, three artists and one curator traveled to Western Utah to see Nancy Holt’s 1973-76 work Sun Tunnels on the Winter Solstice, shivering and windblown. For the Summer Solstice, the original four returned with three new companions, expanding the collective to seven artists, blasted by sand and sun. The artists participating in Thunderstruck 2.0 bring diverse materials into their work--drawing, painting, photography, dirt, salt, magnetic waves, sound, light, and more--in order to transport viewers and offer an authentic sense of place. At the same time, Thunderstruck 2.0 asks questions of the Sun Tunnels… How does this site frame our perception of light, scale, and emptiness? Who did Holt make this work for? What is the relationship between land art and spectacle?
Part travelogue and part creative revisionism, the Thunderstruck project conjures new responses, affective, energetic, and communal, to art historical sites designed for isolation, solitary contemplation, and transcendence.
Documentation by John Whitten
When your sweat smells like heavy metals
Carnation Contemporary, May 29 - June 13, 2021
When your sweat smells like heavy metals reclassifies imagined post-human artifacts of our digital subconscious and material imprints. This solo exhibition by Katherine Spinella transports the refuse of commerce into multimedia amalgamations that are fractured, layered and codified into a poetic abstraction of signs. In a free association free fall approach, Spinella uses digital manipulation, printmaking, sculpture and video to conflate images and abstract signs as they relate to our perceptions of nature. Familiar warning signs, obtuse punctuation, scribbles, shreds, flames and compost amass in a process of renewal-based gestures that make space for something new and unknown to occur.
Exhibition documentation by Mario Gallucci
Thunderstruck
NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY July 12-31, 2019
Carnation Contemporary, September 7-29, 2019
Curated by Jessi DiTillio with works by Rosana Aviña-Beam, Robert Collier Beam, Katherine Spinella, Michael E. Stephen, and John Whitten
This project began with a road trip to New Mexico from three different parts of the country, Oregon, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Meeting in the desert outside Albuquerque, we made our way to the Very Large Array, an astronomical marvel and epic material expression of the human desire to know the universe. Primed by this encounter to experience the earth as a small orb in a vast space, we picked up a pie from a small bakery and headed to the Dia Foundation office to embark on our journey to Walter de Maria’s 1977 work The Lightning Field.
Thunderstruck is the aftermath of that trip, a group of artworks, collaborations, writing, and collective feelings. Forty-one years after the completion of The Lighting Field, we wondered if land art was still relevant. What happens to land art in an age of environmental and political catastrophe? Questions of material, light, history, indigenous heritage and embodiment suffuse these works in print, drawing, sound, sculpture, and installation. Thunderstruck re-presents The Lightning Field as an accumulation of meaning unfixed by time, floating free from De Maria’s authorial intention.
This project was supported by grants from Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon State University Faculty Research Grant, Ford Family Foundation, and Oregon Arts Commission.
Book at Printed Matter
Documentation by John Whitten
Script
Curated by Brittney Connelly with exhibiting artists Hannah Newman, Leslie Vigeant, Katherine Spinella, Kathryn Zazenski, and Sarah Hummel Jones.
Script Podcast Conversations Listen here
</script> was a multi-platform art project facilitated through an ongoing conversation series, artist-curated workshops, a publication, and a group exhibition. Curated and organized by Brittney Connelly, this collaborative effort brings together 5 artists working both regionally and nationally. </script> was realized in an effort to support makers engaging in critical thought revolving around contemporary issues of the digital experience. Conversations were held in an effort to open up a diverse set of perspectives on how empathy, language, and social and economic hierarchies are interpreted through the modern female lens. In addition to the June exhibition, the <script> program hosted a variety of workshops that were curated by the participating artists. These workshops were free & open to the public. Inspired by the open-source nature of the internet, the </script> project was facilitated through both physical and virtual means. The </script> web platform launched in November of 2019. Information be found at www.digitalexhibition.space.
Documentation by John Whitten.
Bloom In
Bloom In was the first exhibition at Outback Arthouse. Featuring artists Caroline Hayes Charuk, Colleen RJC Bratton, Justyn Hegreberg, Katherine Spinella, Katherine Harvath, Rox Crews, and Sarah Mikenis. Exhibition documentation by Outback Founders Katie Holden, Kristin Hough, and Julian Tan.