The Reality Principle: Karin Davie and Caitlin Teal Price
Washington D.C
Pazo Fine Art is thrilled to announce The Reality Principle, an exhibition featuring the works of Seattle based artist Karin Davie and Washington D.C. based artist Caitlin Teal Price. Join us for an opening reception on Saturday, April 6, from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will remain on view until May 25, 2024.
Davie and Price are driven by a shared commitment to form and the importance of process. The works featured in this exhibition present viewers with immersive, psychedelic, abstract terrains that embody the interplay between the micro and the macro, the material and the ephemeral. The careful manipulation of light, color and form could give the viewer the sense that they are looking through a microscope at cellular matter, or through a powerful telescope at intergalactic nebulae. There is a compelling optical contrast between the sense of infinite, deep space evoked by their works, and the tangible physicality of the surfaces they create.
Davie’s seven works featured in the show foreground her mastery of the repeated undulating wave form and gesture. In the larger works, this rhythmic motion skillfully accommodates the borders of her humorously shaped canvases, while in smaller works, it is explored through diptych formats. Price’s nine drawings demonstrate, across a range of sizes, her prowess in intricate, meticulous mark making interwoven with a distinctive use of the play of light. Each artist, grounded in their bodies, undertakes the task of creating with the heightened awareness and hyperfocus similarly required of an athlete. Davie must produce a brush stroke in one steady movement without any room for error lest she must return her surface to the base primer and begin again. Through the mediated layering of gestures, she arranges a series of syncopated waves around a central opening which, when paired with a skillful gradation of color, appears to emanate a shivering light. Price draws in an equally unforgiving procedure that involves incising millimeter-length lines and gouges into a photograph. Her works explore a temporal tension between the capture of a fleeting, almost mischievous instant of natural light and the intensive, tactile labor of etching. Combining these aspects of her process “takes something fluttering and hard to nail down, and puts the concreteness of the physical body back into it.” Stepping back from the intimate, bodily surfaces fashioned by the artists’ concentrated physical mark making, the cosmic scenes remind the viewer of bodies, space, architecture, interiors and exteriors. The key to understanding each artist’s work is physical, substantial, presence.
The Reality Principle refers to the classical psychoanalytic theory of ego regulation; the ability to delay gratification through impulse control and rational thought (a maturing of “The Pleasure Principle,” which compels us to act in pursuit of immediate gratification.) Through controlled, disciplined and choreographed gestures rooted entirely in the concrete and the physical, Davie and Price’s works can make us feel transported to an intangible, metaphysical elsewhere.
An essay by art historian and curator Lily Siegel will accompany this exhibition.
Artist Bio
Karin Davie was born in Toronto in 1965, and is a graduate of Queen’s University, Kingston, ON (BFA, 1987) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1989). Davie received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2015). Her work has been exhibited across North America and Europe, and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo in 2006. Other notable presentations of her work include: The Rubell Family Museum, Miami, FL, and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2015-2017); The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2014); Tate St. Ives International Contemporary Gallery, and Mead Gallery, University Of Warwick, UK (2011-2012); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2008); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2008 and 2012); the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2007); Mary Boone Gallery, New York (1999, 2002, 2005 and 2007); Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm (2006 and 2011); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2004); and Projects 63: Karin Davie, Udomsak Krisanamus, Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli, The Museum of Modern Art, NY ( 1998). The artist is based in Seattle, WA and New York, NY.
Caitlin Teal Price was born in Chicago, IL and grew up in Washington, DC. She earned her BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2002 and her MFA from Yale School of Art 2009. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Robert V Fullerton Museum and the American University Katzen Art Museum and promised to the Phillips Collection and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Notably, her work has been exhibited at Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm Sweden, the Sarasota Art Museum in Florida and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Her most recent solo exhibitions include, “Scratch Drawings” at Candela Gallery in Richmond, VA (2021) and “Green is the Secret Color to Make Gold” at Tephra, Institute of Contemporary Art (2018). Her work has been published in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and TIME magazine. Capricious Publishing NYC published her monograph, Stranger Lives, in 2016 and her work is featured in the Aperture book Object Lesson, (2022). Price is also a Founder of STABLE, a non-profit artist space located in Washington, DC.
Opening reception: Saturday, April 6th, 2024, 6-8 pm
PFA - Washington D.C
1932 9th Street NW, #C102, (Enter from 9 1/2 Street), Washington, D.C 20001
Thursday - Saturday, 11 AM - 6 PM
+1 (571) 315-5279
info@pazofineart.com