KATE BONNER

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce KATE BONNER: The space in things, an exhibition of new photo-based works on view in Gallery 1 from September 17 through October 29, 2022. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 17, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. 

Kate Bonner's works are anchored in digital processes in dialog with drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and collage. In her third solo exhibition with the gallery, The space in things, she continues to redefine the photographic genre vis-à-vis her exploration of the painting and drawing mediums.

Bonner creates digital brushes and paint with photographic material. The photograph becomes an action, making a mark and moving through a duration of thought and feeling. It is a meditative action that claims a present moment. As paint, the photograph is dragged across a digital space and applied to a surface through a motion. “I’m drawing with photographs,” she says. “When I draw, my hand moves without me, acting before I think, tracing the outline of space and time in a different way than a camera can.”

A photo flattens space and time into a fixed frame, but when that image is dragged and smeared across a digital space, it is broken open. In this action — the cutting, the erasing, the digital painting — the photographs lose chronicled detail. They lose main characters, supporting cast and contextual clues. They lose nostalgia, document and narrative. With the plot cut from the center of the photograph, the image separates from its intention and becomes lines, shape and color. The photo loses its fixed identity, and perspective, and in this unencumbered space invites a new frame of reference.