Exhibition
September 2nd – October 7th, 2011.
Opening Reception
September 2nd, 4-9pm.
Closing Reception
October 7th, 4-9pm.
Continua.
319 N. 11th Street, 2nd Floor, Space 2J.
Philadelphia, PA.
We're looking forward to the opening of this exhibition. Katie Murken's work is intellectual and emotional simultaneously. There is often an unexpected beauty in her work that envelopes you while asking so many questions.
In her first solo exhibition, emerging installation and book artist Katie Murken creates a site-specific environment using reclaimed Philadelphia phonebooks as the raw material for the spatial mapping of thousands of colors in spectral progression. Two-years in the making, Continua is a systems-based project that explores the foundational aspect of color as a continuous and singular element that is fragmented into formalized units of three-dimensionally parceled space.
Throughout her career, Murken has engaged with the book as a spatial entity that can be expanded out into the environment or collapsed into a self-contained work. In Continua the phonebook, a stubborn vestige of the analog age, provides the basic modular unit from which the project is built—names and numbers compile alphabetically to become lists, which are arranged into lists on pages, which pile into dimensional stacks forming volumes. These volumes are hand-dyed by the artist according to a pre-established color formula, and then restacked to create floor-to-ceiling columns.
Murken’s enchantment with the color continuum developed during her tenure as a Foundations instructor at Tyler School of Art, where the traditional color wheel still lies at the heart of the study and application of color theory. David Batchelor, in his book Chromophobia, distinguishes the analogical color wheel from the ubiquitous digital color chart. “Analogical colour is a continuum, a seamless spectrum, and undivided whole, a merging of one colour into another. Digital colour is individuated; it comes in discrete units; there is no mergence or modulation; there are only boundaries, steps and edges.” It is precisely this modulation of the color spectrum that Murken manipulates in her concept for Continua. For each of the 24 columns in the installation a unique scale of 24 colors is produced. Colors are selected from the scale according to a set of probabilities, which are designed to favor the slow and nuanced transition from one color into another, yet allow for the occasional juxtaposition of contrasting colors. The system allows Murken to play the spectrum like a musical instrument, resulting in a rhythmic yet unpredictable score of endlessly modulating color. Each of the 24 color continua produced in this process are arranged around the perimeter of an octagonal room, which is succeeded by a gallery of diagrammatic broadsides depicting the theoretical mechanics behind the project.