YOU WIN! (february) Katie Bethune-Leamen
A project for the 8eleven space, birthed in the ichor of February, which explains its reactionary vim. The way that February can feel in our latitude. You know.
Also suddenly remembering being in Ilulissat, Greenland in 2011 to document the icebergs that drift down past Canada’s east coast. A house in town with what gives the immediate, overwhelming impression of being the best, the most impressive, the winning display of all time—two walrus skulls placed in the living room window, facing each other, tusks crossed.
Also a piece I’ve wanted to make for years that seems right for this long, white hallway-like space with a big window for the dumb happy neon to shine out of. A piece hung at my height so I can stick my head in it.
And then lots of other things that are in conversation with each other and all of this stuff. A conversation about objects and their borders and definitions. One that wonders about things with less borders. Things that top things. Shiny things. Very hard not to always have shiny things. So: shiny things. Shiny as an important shorthand for other things.
About the Artist
Katie Bethune-Leamen works in sculpture, installation, and video, thinking about the nature of objects, our relationships with them, and our relationships with each other as mediated through objects. She is interested in the inchoate and the abstract—amorphous things subsisting in an in-between state—as location for engagement and possibility for meaning. Recent exhibitions include Hologram Tupac. Other Things. ALL-ONE! (OpenStudio), the commissioned project Blobs for Lawren Harris’s Glaciers, Icebergs, and Unknown Things (AGO) and the group exhibitions Northern Exposure (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia) and More Than Two (The Power Plant) with upcoming solo exhibitions at Modern Fuel (Kingston, ON) and Eastern Edge (NL). Recent residencies include Fogo Island Arts, and SIM (Reykjavik, IS). She is a 2015 recipient of an OAC Chalmers Fellowship Grant to research sculptural abstraction through travel in Japan, Germany, Italy & the USA.
Documentation by Yuula Benivolski