Kate Eric
Kate Eric: One Plus One Minus One June 26 to December 31, 2011 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Kate Eric: One Plus One Minus One
Kate Eric is a decade-old collaborative identity comprised of Kate Tedman and Eric Siemens, based in San Francisco and Italy. Through their joint work, the artists create surreal scenes that transcend our human scale. Their depictions of either minuscule molecular-like interactions or—seemingly quite the opposite— the dynamics of the cosmos and the universe, are formally expressed by the juxtaposition of different punctilious organic structures, clashing floating veils, and proto-animal parts in watery and almost antigravitational environments. As they explain, “… the inspiration comes as much from what lies on the other end of a microscope or telescope….”1 The equally surreal interview that follows explores the nature of their collaboration and the artists’ belief that human conflict has much of the same visual signifiers as nature and the cosmos. The exhibition at The Aldrich is the artists’ first museum exhibition and it presents a small survey including early work, where the human figure was somewhat present, and their latest, which is quite devoid of human life. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut: Kate, Eric, why are you based in both the United States and Italy? How did your collaboration start?
Nurture Does a Number on the Twins, 2007 Collection of Omar Vizquel Courtesy of the artists and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco
Kate: Eric was based out of San Francisco before we met. I was going to school in London. We met at baggage reclaim at Heathrow Airport in 1999 when I misdirected him to Oxford (he was trying to go to London) during a brief layover on his way to a new life in Barcelona. As I happen to be from Oxford, this worked out well for me. He did eventually make it down to Barcelona and, cleverly leveraging my new acquaintance into what I thought would be a lovely vacation, I decided to drive down to meet him there. My poor English car sort of melted on the way through the south of France. This left me in Barcelona with no money and no particular way of returning home. We went over what I considered to be my marketable abilities, which turned out to be limited to “chicken whisperer” and “able to look like I’m listening to someone when I’m really thinking about chicken whispering.” Eric did not, apparently, consider these to be valid money-making options, and suggested, since I was equally unprepared for any vocation, to choose whatever I wanted to do and he would help. We started doing drawings together and selling them on the famous central street in Barcelona, Las Ramblas, right between the guys who do the spray-painted planets and a parrot that cursed at pigeons. A gallery owner liked the pieces and offered to show them in London. When I returned, I brought Eric with me and we started doing paintings in London and things have gone from there. Due to the restrictions of the laws regarding residency in our respective countries, we bounced back and forth between Europe and San Francisco in six-month intervals for eight years until we married, by which time we had become used to the back and forth and have continued, substituting Italy for England. This affords us plenty of time in a city as well as the isolation of our home in Italy, complete with plenty of chickens for the whispering.
MRM: Through your joint work, you combine your backgrounds in science (Eric) and philosophy (Kate) to create these other-worldly artworks. How do you each contribute from your specific field to the work, conceptually? Kate Eric: Our educational backgrounds, contribute to our work much in the way that your high-school trigonometry contributes to ping-pong—I’m sure there is some overlap, but I can’t remember what it could possibly be. We did, however, both have childhoods featuring oppressive cloud-cover, mediocre food, ludicrous classmates, and the persistent but mistaken impression that we were superior to it all. These factors contributed, respectively, to the depression, searching, sublimation and ignorance necessary to sustain a career in art. They also, in concert with rural isolation, led to long spells of what we shall call “careful observation” (and what our parents might call “looking at the mud” and “trying to feed live ants to worms”). So I suppose our work could be viewed as “low-energy studies in worm-based psychology.” MRM: How do you execute the work in total collaboration? What is your strategy? Kate Eric: Simply put, we take turns. The painting builds up layers as we go along. There are often fifty or so cycles involved in a larger piece.
We have in the past described our strategy thus: “Our work is meticulously conceived, dutifully researched, and extravagantly prepared immediately before the step where we screw it up in some elegantly effective and basic way.”2 We do depend heavily on these mistakes to spark further exploration. Art without accident is evolution without mutation. Thankfully, we have each other and our wildly insufficient communication skills to provide an endless source of accidents. MRM: In some of your work, human presence seems to come together from an accumulation of tensional situations. What is the role of people and human scale in these?
Ambush at Mal Hollows II, 2010 Collection of Alan and Nancy Manocherian Courtesy of the artists and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco
Kate Eric: In many cases, the actual humans in our paintings can be imbued with the coordination and purpose of children at a wedding reception dizzy on fruit punch—sort of bouncy bundles of attraction and revulsion that lead to some inevitable destruction. At other times, there is a corporate movement within the pieces that certainly has parallels with the movements of a human or humans. I don’t suppose we find much evidence of sustained ideology or purpose in human interaction so the “role of people and human scale” is really the same as the “role of glitter and prom-dress scale,” as far as we are concerned.
No No Uncle III, 2007 Collection of Jerome M. Shaw Courtesy of the artists and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco
We have looked at human conflict from a similarly detached perspective, but found the inevitability and universal insignificance to be unnerving, so I think we are hoping for some humanistic insight, if someone has any extra sitting around. We also have been asked if we secretly relish disaster at some level. To that we replied that is seems uncertain to us that the difference between creation and destruction is attributable to anything other than a “point of view� and that inevitably, having one of these, violence and destruction seem to be the 3 environments out of which true creation can arise. MRM: It seems you are moving away from human body representation as the main focus of your works. When did this shift take place and why is that? Kate Eric: People seem incapable of viewing their own interactions without insinuating self-congratulatory measures of intent and contrivance.
We could paint two people ricocheting off each other with all the intelligence of breakfast cereal marshmallows and the consistent reaction would be to assume tragedy, manipulation or triumph. There was an exhibition of ours where all the depicted humans took the place of atoms in the formation of existing molecular compounds—binding and breaking according to chemical properties. We also created fictional “battles” where humans were subject, cue-ball like, to basic physical laws of mass, proximity, velocity.... etc.... Apparently it was more comfortable for people to view these battles as a metaphor for corruption, greed and their role in the continuation of the Middle East conflict. We considered attributing this miscommunication to the ever-dwindling attention span of the art-going public, but the failure in communication was probably our own. Over time, the fascination with equivocating human interactions with that of purely physical objects has dwindled and, along with it, the need for necessarily including the human form itself. We enjoy looking at interactions of any sort, whether it be carbon and hydrogen, a new idea and a preconceived notion, or a cartoon elephant and a mouse. It is the commonality in these interactions that fascinates us. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, curator Interview conducted via e-mail, April 2011 1 http://www.refractionart.com/archives/598 2 Ibid.
Flurry and Inners II, 2009 Collection of Patch Adams Courtesy of the artists and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco
3 Ibid.
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This brochure was made possible, in part, by the generous support of Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco.
Uncle Undone, 2011 Courtesy of the artists and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco
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