Catherine Repko
Gatherer
October 2022
Huxley-Parlour Gallery
Extract ---
Using an emphasis on reduced forms and negative space, Repko explores the intersection between documentary and painting, memory and obfuscation, to create nostalgic and painterly tableaux. The exhibition title, Gatherer, references the archaic practice of gathering as a framework through which to understand practices of care, worldbuilding, and relating to others within storytelling.
Catherine Repko’s exhibition is made using archival reference material, and is developed in particular from home videos of the artist and her three sisters growing up in Italy. Working from pixelated stills, Repko casts digital memories in an earthen palette, using the process of attrition to simplify, flatten, and subtract from the documented compositions. In doing so, Repko’s painting mythologises memory, translating ephemeral footage into tangible objects. Her use of reduction, her relentless commitment to line, and the choice to obscure her subject’s faces both anonymises personal, family memories, and opens up her compositions to become universal tableaux. Repko describes the works as having ‘one foot based in reality’, but as ‘missing something that maybe wasn’t even there to begin with’.
The title of Repko’s exhibition, Gatherer, is in part inspired by science fiction writer, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’. Le Guin opposes the archaic trope of the hunter - often touted as a fiction of heroism, combat, and triumph, to that of the gatherer - a story of those who gather from nature, who carefully plan, stock inventory, and care for communities with a quiet realism. With acerbic wit, Le Guin describes the carrier bag - alongside all other vessels for containment - as a yonic foil to the phallus, and presents the bag as a metaphor for an alternate way of relating to civilisation.
Using this conceptual framework, Repko’s paintings are replete with several, meaningful motifs: baskets, open hands, plain clothes, and anonymous horizons. Her works create fresco-like scenes of care, nurture, and tacility, and use the idea of home as a central pivot for worldbuilding to create gentle and universally alluring compositions. Home, as Le Guin writes, being ‘another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people’.
In situ
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Finding Homes Amongst the Olive Trees, 2022
Catherine Repko
Extract ---
Using an emphasis on reduced forms and negative space, Repko explores the intersection between documentary and painting, memory and obfuscation, to create nostalgic and painterly tableaux. The exhibition title, Gatherer, references the archaic practice of gathering as a framework through which to understand practices of care, worldbuilding, and relating to others within storytelling.
Catherine Repko’s exhibition is made using archival reference material, and is developed in particular from home videos of the artist and her three sisters growing up in Italy. Working from pixelated stills, Repko casts digital memories in an earthen palette, using the process of attrition to simplify, flatten, and subtract from the documented compositions. In doing so, Repko’s painting mythologises memory, translating ephemeral footage into tangible objects. Her use of reduction, her relentless commitment to line, and the choice to obscure her subject’s faces both anonymises personal, family memories, and opens up her compositions to become universal tableaux. Repko describes the works as having ‘one foot based in reality’, but as ‘missing something that maybe wasn’t even there to begin with’.
The title of Repko’s exhibition, Gatherer, is in part inspired by science fiction writer, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’. Le Guin opposes the archaic trope of the hunter - often touted as a fiction of heroism, combat, and triumph, to that of the gatherer - a story of those who gather from nature, who carefully plan, stock inventory, and care for communities with a quiet realism. With acerbic wit, Le Guin describes the carrier bag - alongside all other vessels for containment - as a yonic foil to the phallus, and presents the bag as a metaphor for an alternate way of relating to civilisation.
Using this conceptual framework, Repko’s paintings are replete with several, meaningful motifs: baskets, open hands, plain clothes, and anonymous horizons. Her works create fresco-like scenes of care, nurture, and tacility, and use the idea of home as a central pivot for worldbuilding to create gentle and universally alluring compositions. Home, as Le Guin writes, being ‘another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people’.
In situ
Finding Homes Amongst the Olive Trees, 2022
Catherine Repko