Kate Gilmore

On Friday, March 18, 2011, artist Kate Gilmore visited our class and shared her video and sculptural work. You can see more of her work at www.kategilmore.com

Here are the reviews:


It is the lightheartedness about her that makes Kate Gilmore especially engaging as a speaker. She shares her work with such enthusiasm and no pomposity that is indicative of a truly self-aware artist. I found her work to be more shocking each time I view it. The sweet demeanor gives little warning to the gravity beneath the surface, perhaps a quality that can be used to describe her as a person as well. Like delicious hard candies, her videos entice you with their intoxicating colors and before you realize it, you have the candies in your mouth and you’re working your way through them, a process that is both time consuming and quite unexpected. I really enjoyed the element of surprise that awaits you in each and every video, an impressive feat considering the sheer amount of subject matter she covers.
What I found to be most encouraging about Kate’s lecture was her philosophy of viewing art. She was adamant about being open to all interpretations and that she was happy with any discourse that her pieces may inspire whether they be about gender, sexuality, race, class, or adversity. This way of thinking shows a maturity that I find can be easily buried under the need to speak in highly theoretically terms in order to feel included in the art world. Her determination as an artist and performer is one of the most impressive displays of willpower I have ever witnessed, leading me to think of none other than Marina Abramovic. Kate’s relationship to her body as medium is similar to that of Abramovic. I really appreciated her slight resistance to classifying her work as feminism and found that for that reason, I saw her work as inherently so. The female models in her pieces are women of strength, unwavering and dominant in their pursuit to overcome various obstacles.
The most alluring aspect of Kate’s pieces was the mixture of playfulness and gravity, a formula that she seems to have perfected. This blend results in aesthetically delightful, yet thematically loaded videos. Her videos are often sad, pathetic, and difficult to watch, but their visually entrancing qualities make it impossible to turn away. You feel drawn to the struggle, to the pain of finding one’s place. One of the most distinctly pitiable videos is “With Open Arms” (2005). The main character relentlessly tries to obtain approval by continuing to persevere on stage despite the obviously negative (and violent) responses she receives from the audience. The character appears to be some sort of analogy to the place of the artist as a clown and endless performer, perhaps something that Kate had in mind while producing the video. I couldn’t help but giggle, feeling guilty about it immediately as I realized that it was in fact the very sad journey of finding acceptance that I was laughing at. The characters that Kate creates, though we are given no information except for type of dress, seem to jump from the screen and come together as a motley crew of misfits, all grasping for the same answers.
Although they are meant to be different ordinary women, I saw the many characters as one in the same. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I saw them as Kate herself, but rather as one woman, the main character, trying to mold herself into so many different roles. Kate’s artist talk was inspiring, easygoing, and full of life, much like her art. It was especially rewarding to be able to speak with someone who seems to work with such ease, allowing art to flow from her rather than to dig for it.

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Katie Gilmore’s work is all about disaster. She mentioned that 9/11 greatly changed her work and her focus to more destructive pieces and this feeling of lose of control and hopeless situations. Her early videos are hilarious and entertaining but not as strong as her more recent work. The early video of her in a dress being the center of attention while having tomatoes thrown at herself embodies a very specific female character. Her more recent work has a more abstract female character, which is more relatable as the viewer. In early work she was acting like a character but as her ideas progressed she actually put herself in struggling conditions. The idea of failure is interesting that she has recently started to explore. I think that failure is inevitable and the idea of panic and failure would be an interesting layer to her work. Katie’s more recent work tries to incorporate the sculptural pieces into the exhibition of the videos. The video’s are strong because we see the struggle and energy to achieve something. The sculpture pieces without the actions are weak. The concept does not translate with the same energy. I think that she will resolve this over the next few years similar to how her work has changed from the beginning, which had a strong tie to 9/11. I am very intrigued how the ideas are the same as her early work of the papers falling from the fan with an American flag in the background, but the recent work does not need the gimmick flag to translate the concept. I enjoy the sarcasm that makes the work easy to engage in. The sarcasm helps to keep people from assuming her work is only about feminism. Even though her work has almost completely only female characters, anyone can relate to struggle and failure. The one problem with sarcasm is that today with youtube and people making their own videos of stunts that her work is understood through a different lens than when she first starting using video. Perhaps this is why she has moved toward large installation pieces with hired models. I would be interested to see how her work evolves over the next ten years. I would love to see how she responds to social issues of facebook and the ides of public privacy with youtube and facebook.

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I appreciate the aspect of play in Kate Gilmores work. I think this is an extremely relevant word for the art world today. It implies a preference to recreation for enjoyment over a “serious practical purpose”. Many discourses presently are devoted to creating systems of regulation and functionality; therefore it is even more imperative to carve out a space in the world for play. Art is a great venue for this endeavor as it has the ability to avoid (to some degree, or at least in theory) being measured and quantified along scales of progress or quality. One might even be able to argue that therefore all art is play as it is; manipulating and engaging with mediums for amusement through which one can learn about the things she/he is interacting with and create world of fantasy, which reflects aspects of reality. Doing this refutes the notion of right and wrong, of being able to quantify the world, and allows us to be much more comfortable with the uncertainty and flux of things. Play allows us to cope with the incomprehensibility and continuous change of life while also allowing us to gain some perspective on it through experience.

In her videos, Kate Gilmore creates small games or challenges, all of which have some sort of arbitrary end goal. While she always accomplishes these feats, there is no solid sort of “progress” attained- they are not amazing accomplishments for human kind, they do not provide us with a new groundbreaking information etc. Instead, and more importantly, they provide access to a sort of silly and personal experience, which while it may be physically rigorous, is not grotesque or disturbing. Her work makes us more aware of our bodies and how they relate to our constructed surroundings as well as the ways we choose to interact with those environments. Beyond the obvious ways that she “plays” – by constructing, climbing, breaking, lifting, etc, she also “plays” in a different form- through her characters. Dressing up in generic female costumes and choosing to film her performances, creates a small sort of fantasy (the way a as youth we might have playing dress up might have allowed us to access a sort of alternate reality). Creating and engaging with a character provides an opportunity to see and reexamine that character and its connotations in another context- enabling us to see what new information can be revealed. Finally to her work is that proves that humor is an equally important and effective way to consider and engage in our society and consciousness. In conclusion I am pleased that her pieces encourage play, which might just be the medicines for our overly complex reality.
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