GLASGOW.- Post, by Glasgow based artist Kate V Robertson, delivers the next step towards reshaping and rethinking how we can remain connected to audiences and each other meaningfully in digital spaces.
Kate V Robertson has long been observing how digital spaces are becoming the default setting for all kinds of human experience, questioning the potential detachment from the truths of materiality and physicality that have defined the human condition.
Using collage, drawing and photography the works in Post were made by Robertson before and during lockdown measures were introduced in the UK in March 2020. With the sudden changes, online chat rooms and digital landscapes were brought to the fore. Robertson explores the tools with which we connect our interior and exterior lives, and the conditions that allow for true connection; a universal desire that persists, despite technology or geography.
Robertson’s drive to understand the world around her, manifests in the accumulation of a plethora of subjects and materials. Underpinning this is a desire for art to ask the questions and connect us to the unseen. As the commuter rituals such as picking up a Metro in the subway are put on hold, there is an urgency to preserve the artefacts that contain truths of connection and directness. The traces are in sight, their value within our grasp and the capacity to express ourselves outwith the realms of technology are more important now than ever.
Post continues Robertson’s exploration of our increasingly screen-based life, the spaces we create for connection to take place. Objects are not becoming obsolete on their own, the spaces where we once met each other are shifting too.
Born Edinburgh, 1980, Kate V Robertson works in print, sculpture and installation, with a focus on materials and processes. Robertson selects materials based on their associative connotations, often employing strategies of minimalism, surrealism and conceptual art. Representational systems of technology, advertising and print media are all explored and tested by the materiality of Robertson's work. Robertson often uses the tension between objects to create illusion; to appear yielding, or a rippling wall or cracked floor suggestive of a collapse of ordinary systems and structures. The themes of failure and obsolescence are recurrent in Robertson's practice, even becoming intrinsic to the working processes. Bodies of work often become a conversation between specific and directly expressed concepts, accidents or experiments.
Recent solo exhibitions include; Terminal, Govan Project Space, Glasgow, 2019; Divided and Yet Mutual, Patricia Fleming, Glasgow, 2019; This Mess is Kept Afloat, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, 2018; Object(hood) Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017; Adaptive Expectations Baltic 39, Newcastle, 2016; Semper Vigilantes, OBJECT / A, Manchester, 2016. Her exhibition Semper Solum sited in Oxford House, Patricia Fleming/Glasgow International 2016 was selected by critic Chris Sharratt as one of the outstanding exhibitions of the year in the UK. Alongside this, her work is in the public collection of Glasgow Museums. Robertson has undertaken several high-profile public art commissions including Restore for 2019 Brno Biennale, Czech Republic, Converse for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games, and is currently developing work for Glasgow’s new riverside location Clyde Place with DRUM Property Group for Barclays.
