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(left) "Meat Blanket" (facing page, top) "Truly Co., Oz" (middle) Kate Gordon (bottom) "Cheetah Pool"
Dreamscapes Lafayette artist Kate Gordon's paintings mix reality, dreams and memories by John R. Kemp
Dreams are like waves washing upon a sandy beach. They leave impressions that quickly disappear. Not for Lafayette artist Kate
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ACADIANA PROFILE
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021
Gordon, however. Those enigmatic images conjured in Gordon’s dreams often cross the subconscious threshold to become visual realities in her art. “I consider my work to be a composite of consciousness — a layering of imagery from day-to-day experiences, memories and dreamscapes,” says Gordon. “I try to not censor any of the information that comes from observing.” That combination of ordinary life experiences, memories and dreamscapes comes together to create bright and puzzling imagery that demands the viewers’ attention and challenge their imaginations. Her collages are not literal stories but a series of familiar images juxtaposed to create visual and often dark effects.
“Although I recognize that my translation of the world is idiosyncratic,” she says, “I naturally gravitate towards imagery that is comically dark. I feel that there is something humane in seeing both the dark and the light aspects of the human condition, while trying to find the humor in both.” In that sense, Gordon says she is a “storyteller steeped in the language of painting.” But, she continues, those stories “are neither rational nor linear, their beginnings unpacked from dreams.” As Gordon said in an earlier interview by Ben Hickey, curator at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, she wants viewers to see in her work a “sense of play, a sense of fun.” To create these “neither rational nor linear” stories, Gordon executes watercolor renderings of random and unrelated images as they come to her. She then cuts them up and juxtaposes them against cuttings from other paintings to create, as she says, “a new version of reality.” Next she stitches these ele-
