Perspectives: Artist Kate Gordon

Kate Gordon

The Eclectic Dreamscapes of "Alligator Naps"

James Fox-Smith

If someone could paint your dreams, what would the audience see? Would the result be some smooth, coherent landscape with a clear beginning and end, with everything pretty and making perfect sense? Or would your dreamscape be a weird, otherworldly place—a mashup of memory, lived experience, image fragments, good and bad, dark and light—where tenderness and violence coexist in peculiar juxtaposition, and things happen without rhyme or reason?

“Whac-A-Mole”.

Kate Gordon

When Kate Gordon—a New York artist who formerly taught at the Pratt Institute—moved to Louisiana to take up a professorship in the University of Louisiana-Lafayette Department of Visual Arts, the result was decidedly the latter. The strange otherworldliness of her new surroundings took her by surprise … but in a good way. “Louisiana totally, radically shook up the imagery in my work,” Gordon observed. “My work was already based on the surreal, but then I moved to Louisiana, and it took me a good year of chewing on the visuals here to get my bearings.” Throw in a pandemic and—for a surrealist artist interested in creating dioramas as a means of exploring the human subconscious—the possibilities became rich indeed.

Gordon is a collagist, who will create forty or fifty drawings based on her dreams, imaginings, memory fragments, and day-to-day happenings, then put the results away for a while. Then she’ll pull the whole stack out and storyboard the disparate elements together, literally stitching pieces with monofilament fishing line to assemble surreal dioramas that startle, cajole, challenge, and delight. “My rule for myself is, ‘You have to make forty drawings before you can cut anything up,’” she said. “Make a pile, don’t look at them; then it’s open season. It’s kind of violent but there’s creativity in that destruction.”

And the subject matter? “Everything that bubbles up is fodder for painting,” Gordon laughed. “When I realized I couldn’t tell the whole story in one go, I started making multiple pieces, then putting them together in different ways. I try not to censor things. In the end the sweetness and lightness and innocence is always followed by darkness and violence. Some stuff is so dark and difficult that you just have to laugh at it.”

“Truly Co. Oz”.

Kate Gordon

Gordon makes collage work that is site-specific— installation art that fools with concepts of two- and three-dimensional space because “there’s a little space in the middle where magic tricks can happen.” Her latest, Alligator Naps, is a large-scale, theatrical diorama installed in a long, narrow gallery space at the Hilliard Art Museum at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. Depending on the angle from which they approach it, each visitor can experience the installation differently. The effect creates an illusion of navigating through two-dimensional space, reducing the distance between artist and audience and allowing the visitor to be a participant rather than simply a viewer. Of course, that’s exactly the effect Gordon is going for. “When I’m looking at a painting, most of the time I’m not thinking of what it’s about; I’m thinking ‘Where did the artist want me to go?’” she explained. “I’m walking through [the painting] with them. And when I’m painting, I’m thinking about space a lot. I’m asking, ‘Where does my eye go intuitively?’ And ‘Where does it want to go after that?’ I think so much about that: about where the map is— where’s the treasure hunt.”

Why “Alligator Naps?”

Gordon explained that the title is a nod to her adopted Acadiana environment’s indifference to the passing travails of humankind. “I created this piece during the pandemic, which seemed appropriate, because my work is all about—is a reflection of—unpredictability,” she observed. “As I was building the diorama, [Hilliard Museum curator] Ben Hickey called and asked what to name it. At the time I was thinking about the pandemic, and how the alligators are just out there, floating around and not caring. It’s called “Alligator Naps” because it has everything and nothing to do with what’s happening around us. What was an alligator thinking about, dreaming about? How can we ever know?”

Kate Gordon’s Alligator Naps remains on view at the Hilliard Art Museum at University of Louisiana at Lafayette through June 30, 2021. Paintings and a video installation piece by Gordon are at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s River Center Branch from May 8–31. See more of Gordon’s work at kate-gordon.com or on Instagram at @kategordon_studio.