STATEMENT OF WORK

KIRSTEN R BATES ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Many of the major pieces I have presented in art contexts incorporate photographs, video, often projected, and sound. These are, in some fashion, explorations of the human condition. I have not shied away, in fifty plus years, from using myself as a subject, using people close to me, or dealing with difficult material, as in the presentations of David Wojnarowicz’s monologues from Sounds in the Distance.

I find deeply satisfying, work that has reach beyond the traditional art world. Once Upon a Garden was a collaboration with Curator Lauren Tanchum, who gave me full use of Café Joust in Catskill for the month of October, 2024. October recognizes domestic violence, that problem society hides, keeps silent, and carries a heavy load of shame. I am interested in what is not immediately apparent. When I interviewed my grandfather in 1975, I had found a cache of photographs of him as a young man, posed affectionately with other men. What was verbalized in the interview was his answers to my exploration of his younger self and the choices he made. The slides of him during the interview are interspersed with copies of these photos and texts I could not verbalize, “Were you gay?” being an obvious one.

In Once Upon a Garden I unearthed that part of my past where I gardened obsessively, photographed plants and landscape, even performed for the video camera, while in isolation as my travesty of a marriage ended, finally, in a dangerous situation. This was presented as a fairy tale, with light, beautiful, large photographs, a video which combined mysterious performance in a fog with gorgeous closeups of flowers and bugs, as well as a dystopian installation, “Scenes from a Marriage.” Lauren, who had done art department work in film, created a superficially normal domestic set. To this I added a real photo album of a Nantucket vacation and two suspended drawers with content warnings, titled “Means” and “Intent.” Inside were photographs I took of a startling cache of weapons and later, extremely disturbing books, images that will never be available for dissemination but were necessary to have there.

Anyone could walk in and look at large prints of Iris or Bleeding Hearts, or watch a video that ran in the storefront 24/7 glowing into the night, or look at the curious dirt-covered photographs with garden tools that were somewhat reflected in the video, and not everyone read the subtext. But importantly, victims of domestic violence, mostly past but one ongoing, reached out to me with gratitude for breaking the silence.

As William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Unearthing old material that I have recorded or family ephemera and present it in new contexts or juxtapositions is something I enjoy doing and have the luxury of space, living in a village, to actively incorporate my archive into my studio practice.