Kate Steciw

Lives and works in Willow, NY, USA

Artist statement

My practice focuses on the mechanics and materials of contemporary image production and manipulation. I aim to draw attention to the hand, often hidden, at work in producing contemporary image culture via the use and miss-use of editing tools, commercial printing processes and sculptural interventions. While distinctly image based, the work is often three-dimensional in its final form. I draw from a vast archive of images (personal, licensed or appropriated) as raw material. This allows me to place emphasis on the tools and gestures of image editing, the material attributes of commercial print production, or even unnoticed “artifacts” within these types of images as sites of aesthetic production. I work with the images in Photoshop (sometimes minimally, sometimes extensively) to create a composition; a flower petal, the prongs of a fork, a manicured hand, bubbles in a drink remain recognizable but fragmentary. The images used are juxtaposed regardless of size, resolution, source or palette to further destabilize any predictable narrative or context. I think of each work I produce as a sculpture or a painting in the sense that the images are raw material rather than a final product in and of themselves. I am in pursuit of new ways of experiencing and/or coping with the proliferation of images around me. For me, this has always been achieved by intervening at some point (be it gently or aggressively, physically or digitally) with the image's intended trajectory to liberate...

Artwork