These paintings were exhibited together in my debut solo exhibition, Hopscotch, at the New York City gallery D.D.D.D. in early 2024.
link to press release, written by Kyle Dacuyan (and see below)
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Children on their way from earth to heaven skip across a tower of squares, one-legged, two, tiles circumscribing certain obstacle, occasion, milestones of a life. Hell in many places is the penultimate. We know it when we see it, hopscotch, the game, even if its rules or origins have for many of us dissolved, the various coordinates of time assigned to recognizable form. Where and how we go is determined by some parts entropy, strategy, gravity – as aging often is, our regard of it from inside or behind.
Taken as a frame for Kate Liebman’s vividly textured debut solo exhibition, Hopscotch layers exile and arrival, memory and prediction, disaster and renewal – to suggest the sacred symmetries of what we perceive so frequently in opposition. The narrative line and dial of these experiences are reflected in the exultant compositional shapes of the works, clearly influenced by the arches and portals of divine architecture. There is a worshipful quality to Liebman’s apertures. Lit up blue by the strangeness of God, she announces in the title of one especially reverential work. And what constitutes her reverence? Liebman’s circumferences and pried-open doors create for the viewer a depth of looking in – at mystery, horizon, motion, and cosmos.
The sky of course is a site of vast fixation, a field both unfathomable and familiar, eliciting mythology into assembly. The inclination to myth expresses some civic longing. It comes from looking up and around and then up again together. Airplanes, birds, and celestial bodies recur – and summon with them constitutive passengers, flocks, constellations entangled in the transit of one another. We too before and below are collectively enthralled with the shadowy apparitions of ancestry and future.
Liebman’s densely gathered images vibrate with a desire to cohere the inexplicable through meticulous method and observation. Many Visions and Many Generations present different planes of orbit, genesis and catastrophe, the galactic and the earthly made from shards of one another. Within these and other works, she also imports personal record (times from weather indices, ultrasound images) as well as religious and art historic reference (the text of the Kaddish, the repeated outlines of Masaccio’s expulsion of Adam and Eve). In their manner of compilation, these works hunger for place – within time, family, and history – and simultaneously they identify movement as place, unknowing as a kind of unrolling ground.
This is a show of contact: time touching time, the ghostly pressed upon the infant, and the variations of hands throughout emphasize the haptic qualities of the canvases. We feel dimension by looking at the narrative and physical accumulation of materials – tracing, vellum, layered paint and graphite as analogies for haunting, palimpsest, and transformation. Can an image take us somewhere pre-visual? Hopscotch returns the viewer to a site of sensation as knowledge, that threshold where person and environment first pull into one another.
—Kyle Dacuyan