Contemporary art gallery Atelier will present artist Kat Quay’s first solo exhibition of “light works” from June 6 through July 6.
“Synchronic Botany: [De]Constructing the Hyperreal” is an exhibition of seven pieces featuring lightboxes and three-dimensional printed botanicals, as well as two photographic works mounted on aluminum.
Quay is a sculptor working in metal, glass and light. In her studio practice, she experiments with the push/pull of two versus three dimensions to explore breakages in spatial logic at the boundaries of physical and digital space, according to a news release from Atelier.
Inspired by modern society’s ever-growing digital engagement, Quay has constructed a series of steel-framed, backlit, wall-mounted artworks that feature layers of glass, metal and 3-D prints. She conceptualizes the work from Photoshop files, calling each “a constructed axonometric interpretation of the virtual space in photo editing software.”
In each lightbox work, Quay explodes the 2-D image plane and builds material layers consisting of a filter foreground, subject middle ground and illuminated background in the style of a monitor. The filter layers, composed of textured glass, distort the 3-D printed floral and foliage spreads behind them.
The artist selects florals for the series based on her own experience. Dogwood is indigenous to each place Quay has lived. Lavender, peonies, and daylilies filled her childhood yard. Texas bluebonnets were prevalent where she attended graduate school, bougainvillea surrounded her wedding reception, and hydrangeas are abundant in the metro-Detroit neighborhood where Quay lives and maintains her studio.
Philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality — a blurring between what is real versus simulation — is ever present in Quay’s botanicals. The florae have been altered from their original form through a dual digital and material process. Quay creates a 3-D scan of artificial versions of the plants, edits the digital models to remove faux artifacts, and reproduces them as 3-D prints. The result is a lifeform frozen in time and set against the black, reflective, illuminated environments of the lightboxes. The uncanny florals are intended to reference file saving while demonstrating a mode of digital permanence in a physical world.
“I respond to works that are beautiful, display artistic virtuosity, and have a strong intellectual underpinning,” Atelier Director Sea Grandon said. “Quay’s Synchronic Botany series hits all these marks. The works are beautiful, sculptural, luminous and meticulously rendered. The ideas she investigates are fascinating and sophisticated. At first glance, one will be awestruck by the beauty of the work, and upon further consideration, one will find a deeper intellectual meaning.”
Grandon says that when she opened Atelier, she wanted to include artists working at the intersection of aesthetics and technology. “Warsaw, Indiana, is the Orthopedic Capital of the World and a burgeoning medtech and life sciences incubator,” she said. “As such, I want some of the programming at the gallery to highlight the innovation, conceptual thinking, and engineering that are hallmarks of our community.”
In 2022, Quay exhibited at the prestigious ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Mich. She is currently executing a major public art commission in a new terminal at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Spatial Weaving will be a permanent wall installation in the terminal measuring a monumental 12 by 48 feet.
Grandon says Atelier’s exhibition of Quay’s work will be the perfect show for the impending summer solstice. “The gallery will be aglow with white lights on summer nights, and guests to the gallery will be able to explore the sculptural botanicals,” she says. “I have a feeling that the lightbox with peonies — Indiana’s state flower — may emerge as a crowd favorite.”
“Synchronic Botany: [De]Constructing the Hyperreal” opens June 6 and runs for one month through July 6. ATELIER’s hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
Quay was born in New Jersey in 1987 and lives and works in the Detroit Metro area. She has a Bachelor of Art in art and art history from Colgate University and an Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and extended media from the University of Texas at Austin.
Her work was recently aboard the International Space Station via Sojourner 2020, an art payload sent by MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Institute on Space-X’s Dragon Vessel. She was a 2018 nominee for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award and selected as a 2017 artist-in-residence at A-Z West and Studios at MASS MoCA. Quay was a speaker on the 2017 SXSWedu panel session “The Art and Science of Spatial Perception.”
She is currently completing a public art commission and permanent installation for the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport terminal expansion. “Synchronic Botany” is Quay’s first solo exhibition.
Atelier is a contemporary art gallery in Warsaw, owned and directed by Grandon, a contemporary art advisor and attorney. She opened Atelier in March 2023.