Kate Liebman
Bio: Kate Liebman is an artist who lives and works in New York. By working serially, she tests whether seeing leads to understanding. She locates the present in its historical context with the notion that history is a corkscrew, constantly winding back on itself. Her work attends to the passage of time -- time as recorded in history, art history and memory. She investigates the overlap and interplay between the personal and collective, between the self and the screen, and how the tension between remembering and forgetting impacts these subjects. She graduated from Columbia University with her MFA in 2019, and Yale College with her BA in 2013. She has received residencies and grants from the Lower East Side Printshop, Works on Water, the Vermont Studio Center, the Institute for Investigative Living at AZ West in Joshua Tree, and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at FringeArts, LatchKey Gallery, the Wallach Gallery at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, 15 Orient, the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, MX, FringeArts Philadelphia, Montez Press Radio, and the Jewish Museum of New York. She has taught courses at Columbia, Sussex County Community College, and the Manhattan Graphics Center. Her work has been featured and reviewed on WKCR, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, and The Yale Review.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
I want to address you, reader, if you are in fact still reading and looking. I want to ask you something.
I want to ask you if you think that seeing leads to understanding?
I am not convinced. And yet it sometimes feels like the entire world hinges on the belief that seeing something will lead to understanding something.
There are titles of books I have read parts of or books I have thought about reading that sit on my shelf that seem to take up the issue of vision and knowledge. I find these titles very appealing, but the text inside them very challenging.
I want to ask you what shape you think the landscape is, and what shape you think surveillance is?
I want to ask you if you’ve ever seen small stones on top of a grave?
I want to ask you how you think time works?
I want to ask you if you think these images are romantic?
I want to ask you if you’ve ever uploaded an image to google maps streetview?
I want to ask you what you do when you’re faced with a camera?
I want to ask you who you think was meant to see these images?
I want to ask you is now a phrase that’s stuck in my head but I’ve run out of questions to ask you.
L to R: A Month Ago (01:19 minutes video, projected and looped, Stills (monoprints), 2017); After Goya, (stills), (projection, 84 colored pencil drawings on vellum, 2018-2019); Battle of Algiers, Scene 1 (51" × 69",Oil on canvas, 2019)