Opening November 7th in our Members’ Gallery is Homesick by Kate Pieterman.
Kate’s work explores the disorienting feeling of becoming an adult, of hardship, of homesickness for childhood, and empathy for the people she grew up with. Her archive of family photographs is used as the basis for her paintings. These photographs act as a tool for reflection. They provide her with both a sense of longing for the simplicity of childhood, while juxtaposing a deeper sense of gravity and understanding of the difficulties of adulthood that she has discovered. She fashions images that are deeply personal and yet not overly specific, in the hope that her paintings might relate to others’ experiences of childhood and growing up.
Her paintings are figurative, with loosely abstracted elements. Her compositions highlight elements of amateur photography through the process of repeatedly tracing and manipulating the photograph she works from. She is interested in creating subtly disorienting compositions that evoke a sense of instability and unease. In her process of sifting and sorting through family history, drawings from her own childhood have emerged; energetic interventions and youthful scribbles scrawled across pages. These drawings are full of life and playful confidence. Marks that imaginatively respond to the drawings completely transform the original images into conversations with the past. These additions are conversations between her calculated, adult self, and her inner child. Her intention is to take these feelings and present them to the viewer as well as inject the images with a feeling of playful irreverence toward the difficulties, joys and lessons of getting older.
Join us from 6-8pm on November 7th as we celebrate the opening of Homesick, alongside new exhibitions by Ibrahim Shuaib in our Main Gallery and Nasim Pirhadi in our Project Gallery! RSVP here!
Kate Pieterman is based in Vernon, BC. She has been deeply inspired by simple moments since she was a child, and longs to create art that continues to reflect this. She works primarily in oil and acrylic painting. Her work is based on her archive of family photographs, which she repeatedly traces and manipulated to create compositions alluding to amateur photography, childhood memories and the disorienting feeling of becoming an adult. Her paintings are largely figurative, with loosely abstracted elements which transform the images into meaningful conversations between inner child and adult.
Kate is currently studying at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, where she is working toward completing her Bachelor of Fine arts.