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KATHERINE GAGNON

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Katherine Gagnon artist book with images of work and essay by Christopher Stackhouse.

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Page 1: Katherine Gagnon

KATHERINE GAGNON

Page 2: Katherine Gagnon
Page 3: Katherine Gagnon

KATHERINE GAGNON

Page 4: Katherine Gagnon

KATHERINE GAGNON

All images © 2014 Katherine GagnonEssay © 2014 Christopher Stackhouse

No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the permission of the copyright holder.

Designed by Heather Graham

Printed at Indigo Ink9221 Rumsey Rd, Suite S-6Columbia, MD 21045

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5

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KATHERINE GAGNON

WoodblockOil on woodblock

4” x 4” x 1.5”2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tropical DreamOil on cotton

6’ x 6’2014

Installed at Art Farm, Nebraska

Katherine Gagnon-Paintingby Christopher Stackhouse

Images of Work

Biography

1

9

43

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KATHERINE GAGNON

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KATHERINE GAGNON - PAINTINGBy Christopher Stackhouse

Color is a ubiquitous luxury constantly available to the healthy

attentive eye of painter Katherine Gagnon. Taking on chromaticity

as a primary formal concern can run the risk of reducing painting

to academic monochromatism. However, Gagnon privileges the

use of pigment, hue, and tenor without subordinating the structural

import of shape and line. Compositional integrity in the development

of a legible expression, in a declared complete painting, depends

on a careful balance between these components. Draftsmanship is

necessarily employed, but figurative images as they appear in the

paintings culminate from brush strokes and paint handling. Drawing

is subsidiary to painting. Figuration tends to give way to abstraction,

and, abstraction to figuration, essentializing properties of form. The

trading back and forth form and formlessness while near exclusively

using color as the hinge has many precedents. Historically important

to relate to Gagnon, for one, is the painter Perle Fine (1905-1988).

Fine’s diversity in painterly approach expanded over a long career

(gestural, geometric, figuration, symbolist), but Gagnon, as a

descendant of Fine’s, has compressed such an exploration constantly

shifting direction in order to find a painting language that works within

and outside of puristic painterly mode. It is this ambition toward a

theoretical ideal that provides the engine to constellate and weave,

while taking notice of the natural or material world through fantastical

indices of sensual, emotional, worlds. The results present a curious

building and subverting of artistic vocabularies.

Gagnon’s production over the course of the past few years has been

consistently serial. Each of the series is named like chapters of a

KATHERINE GAGNON - PAINTING

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KATHERINE GAGNON

book – Carnival, Life Cycles,

Return Forward, Explorations

in Word & Image, and the latest

Loon Calls at Night. Favoring

the firm working surface of

wood (occasionally metal)

panel, preferring it to stretched

canvas, most of these paintings

are square in format with some

notable exceptions. Stump

(2014) (image 1) is a portrait of a

splintered tree stump in surrealist

color or in color that could have

been captured in a particular

but rare light of day. The bark is

striated in turquoise, sky blue, pink, green algae, orange with hints of

fuchsia and white. All of these colors are grounded by underpainting

in a tonal range of natural brown, which define the stump’s structural

mass. The growth rings of the dead tree that form a plane, equally

filled with a variety of hue, slopes toward the viewer. In these looping

bands Gagnon’s indulgence in and volubility with paint is clear.

However several relationships in art are being made in this ostensibly

unassuming image of modest dimensional size. Anthropomorphizing

the remains of the dead tree via portraiture re-animates it, gives

it expressive living character. Flanking this central figure are bark

tinged verticals that are implicitly thriving arboreal kin guarding the

wounded. Loosely brushed in, in the distance, are barren trees beyond

a clearing, and just peeking out above those is a bit of silver-white sky.

In combination a portrait is made of an object that constitutes the

contents of a landscape within a landscape, which has been damaged

by unseen forces but revitalized in the imagination of the painter. What

this echo and sight rhyme metaphorically indicate is no more specific

than what is visibly there, yet the possibilities are various. One looming

association is the one made of the ‘practice of painting’ with a ‘dead

image 1, pg. 2

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tree’ returned to forest floor fertilizing soil for new growth. Projecting

a revaluation of painting based on what appears to be an arbitrarily

chosen object (a tree stump in the middle of nowhere) near singularly

reproduced in this art, might suffer being overstated if Gagnon’s effort

to speak (or write) through painting were not so dependably overt.

Paintings from Explorations in Word & Image draw further attention to

how indeterminacy is less of a strategy than a condition that frames

the productive tensions in

Gagnon’s work. A brush stroke

is a brush stroke disclosing its

ambiguity before betraying

it. Garden (2014) (image 2) is a

landscape that is carnivalesque

in tenor, loosely composed

primarily of softly rounded

chevron patterns in pink, blue,

and shades of yellow ochre. It is

a portal into a dream-like space

where what is happening in the

painting is painting performing

painting. It is playful and sincere. Unfinished flowers and mingling

dashes of green sketching tall grass, background two dark triangular

mounds. These blackish shapes could be mountains but they could

also be crudely drawn anatomical symmetry - breasts, or legs, or

arms reaching with hands disappearing into the foliage. Giving the

impression of a view out of an interior onto an exterior, exactly what

type of building a viewer might be looking out from, into this imaginary

yard, is beyond description. Arcs and angles impose linearity over two

dominant fields of color- fuchsia on the top portion, and, a warm orange

glow below it. The painter registers mark making as communicative, again,

with the specifics of the message being left with and guided by conjecture.

KATHERINE GAGNON - PAINTING

image 2, pg. 3

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KATHERINE GAGNON

Other paintings in this series offer variable tests of this method.

Star (2014) (image 3), a hieroglyphic circle flanked at four poles by ovals

attached to it, hints at a face/head and at planetary orbit. Ride (2014)

(image 4) gives the visual sensation of the blurred periphery experienced

during train or automobile travel, while dissipating letters that could be

perceived to spell “DINE” or “RIDE” blend in with vertical and horizontal

lines, open and closed shapes that advance and recede into view,

groundlessly floating in undefined space. In another, Gagnon puns on

negation and secrecy, writing with a paint brush in cursive the word

“knot.” (image 5)

Mystique in art is a constant

quality upon which viewer

attention depends. Behind every

art work there are perceivable

unknowns, set off by the factual

object at hand that may inspire

curiosity. Gagnon takes for

granted the viability of painting

to intercept the eye and converse

with it. The physical act of

looking, with intentionality, is

image 3, pg. 4 image 4, pg. 4

image 5, pg. 4

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KATHERINE GAGNON - PAINTING

both a muscular and subtle

exercise, especially in the studio.

Giving herself permission to

make paintings that are allusive,

expressive and accessible is

generous beyond the confines

of her practice. A great example

of this is Love Letter (2013) (image

6) a pinkish monochrome with

undertones of gray applied to an

approximate 4’ x 4’ galvanized

steel panel. It features another

singular centrally placed

equivocal document: a closed gift card envelope. Depicted flat and

frontal like a poster, the image of it is simple, smart, and clear. Its

dominant two toned rectangle in a square, with cadence of angles,

echoes and owes much to Post-War American Abstraction (geometric

and minimalist mostly). The title describes not only the painting as

a sealed love note to someone specific from someone specific, but

it cues Gagnon’s affection for modernist painting. What’s wonderful

about the choice in genre here is the lack of preciousness. The work is

deceptively direct. Gagnon has ideas that might be trying for a radical

formalist, yet inviting to the uninitiated. These paintings signal the early

stages of an artist making a passionate appeal to painting to continue

doing what it has always been known to do, and with volume, that is,

to speak to people.

image 6, pg. 5

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KATHERINE GAGNON

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7MICA MFA Thesis Exhibition

D Center Gallery, Baltimore, MD

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KATHERINE GAGNON

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Tree FigureOil on panel

14” x 11”2014

IMAGES OF WORK

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KATHERINE GAGNON

Loon Calls at NightOil on panel

5’ x 5’2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

Running Through the WoodsOil on panel

5’ x 5’2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

SprungOil on panel

18” x 18”2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

StumpOil on panel

30” x 24”2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

Hide and SeekOil on panel

18” x 18”2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

SycamoreOil on panel

18” x 18”2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

Snake BiteOil on panel

18” x 18”2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

Tulip SeasonOil on panel

5’ x 5’2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

For OpheliaOil on panel

16” x 16”2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

GardenOil on panel

16” x 16”2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

BloomersOil on canvas

4’ x 4’2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

RideOil on canvas

16” x 16”2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

PopOil on panel

18” x 18” 2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

On the RangeOil on panel

5’ x 5’2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

StarOil on panel

16” x 16”2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

SlopesOil on panel

16” x 16”2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

KnotOil and sand on panel

18” x 18” 2014

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IMAGES OF WORK

MeadowOil on panel

18” x 18” 2014

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KATHERINE GAGNON

LeRoy E. Hoffberger Seminar RmMICA, 2013

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IMAGES OF WORK

Love LetterOil on galvanized steel

4’ x 4’2013

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KATHERINE GAGNON

DropOil on panel

20” x 20”2013

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IMAGES OF WORK

VeilOil on aluminum

12” x 12”2013

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KATHERINE GAGNON

SailboatOil, aluminum, glass, and steel

7” x 8” x 4”2013

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IMAGES OF WORK

WindowOil on panel

18” x 18”2013

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KATHERINE GAGNON

PalladiumOil and sand on panel

24” x 20”2013

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IMAGES OF WORK

MirrorOil on aluminum

12” x 12”2013

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KATHERINE GAGNON

In the CloudsOil and gesso on panel

12” x 24”2013

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IMAGES OF WORK

dust/lustOil on aluminum

12” x 12”2013

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KATHERINE GAGNON

TouchOil on panel

16”x 16”2013

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IMAGES OF WORK

FloatOil and sand on panel

24” x 24”2013

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KATHERINE GAGNON

WholeOil on panel

16” x 16”2013

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IMAGES OF WORK

fish swim awayOil on panel

18” x 18”2012

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KATHERINE GAGNON

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BIOGRAPHY

Katherine Gagnon holds a MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School

of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Art

History and Studio Art from Colby College. In 2011 she participated

in the Summer Painting Intensive at Columbia University. She was the

recipient of the Hoffberger Foundation Scholarship from 2012-2014.

Her residencies include Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska and being

the Maryland Institute College of Art-St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Artist House Fellow in Residence for the fall semester of 2014 at St.

Mary’s College of Maryland. In 2014 she presented her paper “Art as

Communication” at the International Association of Word and Image

Studies Conference and the Annual Scottish Word and Image Group

Conference at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

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Front Cover:Stump

Oil on panel30” x 24”

2014