Cole Pratt Gallery presents Street Vernacular, an exhibition of mixed media monotypes and canvas works by local artist Katie Rafferty. The artist’s richly variegated works feature familiar glimpses of local scenery through her abstract layers of collage, paint and gestural marks. Opening reception will be held Saturday Jun 6th from 6-8 pm, and the exhibition will continue through June.
New Orleans is a city built on imperfections; and those who really love the city, love it for its innumerable quirks. Katie Rafferty’s work is inspired by her beloved, idiosyncratic home which provides her with a surfeit of material to employ in her art. For Street Vernacular, she has drawn from local architecture to create abstracted cityscapes that hint at familiar shapes and subjects. This includes elements indigenous to the city: shotgun houses, urban skylines, ornate architectural details, certain flora and fauna, local graffiti and crumbled sidewalks. In House and Garden – and Sidewalk Chalk the artist weaves together lacey, multicolored scribbles around a silhouette of New Orleans’s iconic shotgun house. For Street Vernacular, Rafferty takes the bad with the good, the interesting with the banal, and calls it all beautiful.
Anxious to achieve a unique look for her series of monotypes, Rafferty invented her own printmaking technique. To echo the results of an engraving, the artist applied layers of wax into her plates and carved into the malleable surface, leaving empty space to hold pigment. After exhaustive experimentation, she was able to master a process that can simulate the effects of both monotypes and engravings while duplicating the fleshy, lush surface of encaustics. In addition to the etched wax plate, Rafferty has continued to incorporate mixed media, like lace, blueprints and handmade stencils, into her work. The layered image is transferred directly to paper by way of a press, producing a single print on which Rafferty will continue to draw and collage. Rafferty’s intricate process of amassing and mixing various media produces a richly complex surface, and though singular elements can seem primitive or child-like, the whole is unquestionably elegant.
View the exhibition here
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