Artist biography:

Katie St. Clair is currently in her final year as an MFA candidate at the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. This year she was awarded a Smucker”¢Wagstaff Scholarship to embark on an ambitious 800+ mile bike ride from Ann Arbor to Marquette Michigan in the Upper Peninsula. For two weeks, she cycled along county roads, cow pastures, corn crops, and Michigan’s beautiful coast, collecting imagery and material for upcoming paintings inspired by growth and decay in the natural world. Exploring has always been a priority in St. Clair’s art practice, traveling to countries in Southeast Asia, South America, and Europe. In 2006 she graduated Magna Cum Laude with her BFA in painting from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She was granted artist residencies at Parsons, The New School of Design, Munich Exchange Program, and the Vermont Studio Program. She has held solo exhibitions at NCRC Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Global Lead Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her numerous group exhibitions include shows at Arts Space Beijing, China, and at Broadway Gallery in New York City. She is currently represented by Kuaba Gallery in Indianapolis, which will be hosting her in a solo show in 2014.
Artist statement:

My large scale landscapes weave layers of paint into fragmented photo collages of highly detailed images of nature. I gather these images from my natural surroundings and, most recently, from roadside locations that challenge my assumptions about where nature is most vibrantly manifested.

Drainage ditches, land between gas stations and street medians are places that breed uncertainty. They are largely ignored boundary lands, gathering the detritus of our culture into a tentative wildness. Unless we have a reason to be in these places, they are glanced over, forgotten, lost, or just never found. Children see the possibility of these places; in adulthood it takes open eyes, imagination and a willingness to explore that is rare. Every day I expand my awareness of this territory and submerge myself in experiences that inform my thinking.

In the details of my work there is a meeting place of constructed human spaces and natural environments. I complicate the interaction by cutting into the images, so it takes longer to read them. A collage is a layering of experiences, most of which are felt and not seen in their absence. Images that hold tense conversations, textures that rub shoulders, and the weaving composition that holds these complexities while also guiding direction. These choices create an atmosphere, in spatial form rather than linear understanding.

I believe that displacement shows us things we may have overlooked. The title Second/Nature derives from my process of giving these images a new space to be investigated. When we become aware of all the subtleties around us, we open our senses to a new world and ways of seeing.



­