Artist Katie Caron: The Art of Concepts
01 Dec 2016
Katie Caron wants you to question your world
By Haley Gray Katie Caron spent much of her summer holed up in what she calls her “dirty” studio–the one of her three studios that’s designated for roll-your-sleeves-up kind of work. She liked to be there alone, in silence, surrounded by cast-off scraps from a rubber-toy manufacturer and countless softball-size porcelain orbs.
The Art of Raising Questions
Caron likes to use nontraditional media, especially repurposed industrial waste, such as Styrofoam and shrink-wrap, to construct installations that often swallow entire spaces. Her imposing installation “Glacial Retreat” took over all of Longmont’s Firehouse Art Center this past fall. With what felt like plasticized mountains and melting Styrofoam glaciers, Caron put viewers in the uncomfortable position of reckoning with their environment. Her work asks: To what extent do we live in the natural world, and to what extent do we live, quite literally, in fabricated, mostly plastic spaces? That tension, between the organic world and something else, charges most of Caron’s work. In “Autonomic Healing,” a struggle between synthetic toxicity and the biological world is at play, but mysteriously so. Are the bulbous forms like cysts, toxic growths in the body that the astral antibodies are dismantling? Or are the orbs the ones under attack, like white blood cells succumbing to dark viral invaders? Which forms are doing good? Where do we empathize? Caron’s work is meant to imbue its audience with these questions, not answer them.
