KATHRYN DUNLEVIE

COVER VERSIONS

I have always been intrigued by apparent inconsistencies in time and space, and by each individual’s shifting sense of reality. In recent years I have fractured and reassembled photographs to symbolize the building blocks of matter and to suggest the intrusion of alternate worlds. In my mixed media works, everyday images have been transformed into compositions that hint at invisible, underlying structures and imperceptible extra dimensions.

Shanachie

Shanachie, 2010, mixed media on vintage album cover, 12½" x 12½"

In 2010 I was invited to create a work of art for a Goodwill Industries “green” themed fundraiser. Artists were encouraged to visit Goodwill stores to select recycled items to use in their work. I found myself drawn to the old record albums and chose some to experiment with as not-so-blank “canvases”. Incorporating the album covers into my process added diverse textures and elements from popular culture, and even more importantly, provided a wide range of bizarre inspirational springboards.

Any World

Any World, 2010 mixed media on vintage album cover, 12½" x 12½"

Combining my photographs with vintage album covers continues to take me in unexpected directions. Relics from our communal visual archive are overlaid with contemporary images, tipped over, mashed up, and pushed back – creating jumps through space and time. With each Cover Version I hope to suggest that separate dimensions have indeed collided.

April, 2011.

MATTER, SPACE AND TIME

In recent years my work has been inspired by ideas from contemporary physics. In my series Matter Unmasked (2007-2008) I wanted to illustrate the actual, though visually imperceptible, make-up of matter. I discovered I could best convey the notions of molecular structure and subatomic movement through the hard edges of collage. In order to create recognizable scenes as well as a sense of underlying motion and structure, I integrated intact images with mosaic-like passages of small shards of photographs. This created a sense of surfaces stripped away to reveal a magnified view of what actually existed underneath.

Matter Unmasked: La Visitazione, 2008, mixed media on panel, 45" x 58"

Matter Unmasked was followed by the series Syncopated Spaces (2009-2010) in which I combined the ideas behind Matter Unmasked with the photographic deconstructing and reassembling of specific places. Integrating interwoven perspectives with glimpses of the infinitesimal, I attempted to telescope and reverse telescope, back and forth through time, and inward and outward through space.

Syncopated Spaces: Oxford Circus, 2008 mixed media on panel, 32" x 25"

While producing these handmade works, I was also working with my photographs digitally: layering, perforating and “collaging”. Each of the resulting series of images - London Calling (2008), Earthly Matters (2009), and Backalley Springtime (2010) - began with a set of photographs from a particular locale, but developed a sense of place and narrative only as digital processes were applied.

December, 2010.

Earthly Matters: Fauna, 2009 mixed media on panel, 24" x 24"

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

Inspired by a space, I photograph it segment by segment from various vantage points. Next, I arrange and rearrange the images until a coherent composition emerges. The result—a photographic equivalent of a Cubist collage—is uneven, with visual jumps occurring wherever the edges of two photos meet. Finally, I paint, blurring the borders between photos and smoothing the abrupt shifts in perspective.

This knitting together of the disjunctive parts seems to coax the space into giving up its secrets. It is as if a plateau's sunken river bed were to unfold and rise up into the viewer's line of sight, or as if a "mirror-on-a-stick" spy-toy allowed a look straight ahead to reveal details from outside the viewer's visual scan.

The interweaving of various perspectives creates a space with twists and ripples, revealing unexpected nooks and crannies and peeks around corners. The initial photo-collage is transformed, through the act of painting, into a pictorial space where weird transitions and subtle spatial anomalies emerge.

The depiction of this new space is not just a record of what we see while moving in space over time, but includes elements that have appeared as if from beyond the customary four dimensions. Amidst the reorganization of the various perspectives, the viewer catches sight of details not visible in the original space: details suggestive of the extra dimensions posited in contemporary theoretical physics.

This new pictorial space is not just a composite of things we see as we move through space and time. It also offers glimpses of what may actually exist around us that we do not see.

September 2004

More than Meets the Eye: Storm Warning, 2002, mixed media, 60" x 60"

NOT AT FIRST GLANCE

Our media-saturated lives, punctuated by cell phones and computer screens, have forced us to develop a new type of perception. The rapid connect/disconnect we experience both firsthand through our senses, and vicariously through news and entertainment, creates a barrage of simultaneous and often conflicting flashes of data.

We have adapted to this overload by instantly filtering out the extraneous and assembling the relevant into ad hoc composites. In our visual sweep through the contemporary world, we no longer perceive things as “still”, but as “caught” in transit for that instant after they have registered and before they are replaced. Innumerable stimuli demand our attention and force us to step up our level of pattern formation: choosing what to keep, what to discard and how to make sense of what remains.

Integrating photography and painting, my work is a visual rendering of the structure of this new perception—not a linear catalogue, but a synthesis of pertinent images extracted from the ceaseless bombardment. The camera stands in for our eyes, recording random hits of visual information. Selection and assembly of key images function like the contemporary subconscious: editing and organizing only the most significant elements into compositions whose apparent harmony masks incongruities not obvious at first glance.

September 2001

Not at First Glance: London Inside Out, 1999, mixed media on panel, 45" x 60"