Kate Steciw – Live Laugh Love

11 May – 17 June 2012

The Green Room is delighted to be exhibiting work by Kate Steciw, made over a three year period in her first European solo exhibition.

Live Laugh Love is representational of Steciw's exploration of ideology in the uses of, and personal relationships to, both ‘image’ and ‘imaging’.

The title work (Live Laugh Love, 2012) exemplifies how commercially manufactured objects customarily purchased upon the appreciation of their images, can dictate an ideology of “personal” desires. By simple manipulation of these objects, the typical ideological association comes under scrutiny, physically the decorative wall pieces ‘Live Laugh Love’ become unreadable in sculptural manifestations of themselves.

In works; Exercises In Spatial Mnemonics, My Dog, My Wife (all 2011) and Versions on a Calico House Cat (2010) Steciw references common photography; travel, family snapshots and photos of pets; that may otherwise be forgotten, lost in data, to transgress to the status of “other”. This is achieved through editing techniques, such as the stretching and blurring of images before making use of readily available, online printing services.

These services cater to a public domain where, again, projected ideals associated with the consumption of objects and their uses proliferate. “Such systems are entirely reliant on context and composition and are fatally disrupted by even minor interventions. The assumed rigor of this relational system of symbolic language is what drove me to experiment with re-contextualising objects and images in an effort to create new or alternate ideologies, or simply disrupt the delivery of the intended ideology.” – Kate Steciw

The Green Room has commissioned a special limited edition by Kate Steciw of 50 such objects in the form of “photo-tiles” for distribution during the exhibition.

Kate Steciw (PA, 1979) is interested in the relationship between imaging and image consumption. Her work explores the production and distribution of photography and how images stimulate human memory and desire. With ten years experience in image retouching, Steciw articulates and abstracts images to transgress their typical ideological associations. In recent practice she subjects photography to various new forms by “making the photograph ‘other” and exploring how “photography creates appetites for physical objects”.

Exhibitions include; Popular Options – Klaus Gallery and Aude Pariset/Kate Steciw/Letha Wilson – Toomer Labzda, both New York and That is the Dawn’ – Gregor Staiger Gallery, Zurich [all 2012] and Love My Way – Primary Photographic Gallery [solo] and Notes on a New Nature – 319 Scholes, both New York and A Small Forest – Kunsthalle New, Chicago [all 2011].

Kate received a BA in Sociology from Smith College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kate’s photobook ‘The Strangeness of This Idea’ was published in 2010 [Hassla] and her workhas been featured in ‘The Collector's Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2’ [Humble Arts Foundation].