katie dorfman

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Kathryn Dorfman is receiving her MFA in poetry at NYU. She is interested translating poetry to the page through collage, fragmentation —how do we make a poem? How do we craft art? Can these processes become similar? From collaging her childhood nightlight to putting lockboxes with her poetry in the back of paintings, she questions- can you own a poem? Hang it on your wall? Should you be able to? Dorfman’s work has been exhibited at Callum gallery, NYC and Wall and Wahl in Millbrook, NY. She is currently working on her first poetry collection. In the The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot sees his fragmentation as undesirable, a sign of society disintegrating, but in the modern age, we might use fragmentation to sort through society and the self. These 3 collages pay homage to my grandmother, the sculptor Luise Kaish and her burnwork collages, using her technique of burning canvass. I try to collage her journey into mine. The wood frames act as story scaffolding, separating subjects from one another, just as a poem might isolate an image. How can we map an epic poem onto a collage? Part of an epic is a descent to the underworld on the hero's journey. In Allen Ginsberg's epic Howl, this underworld travel is marked by jazz throughout. These collages are an attempt to breach the underworld through my grandmother. All three colleges have poems enclosed in the back in a wooden lock box. Luise (https://www.luisekaish.com) famously sent her ashes to space in a rocket; her obsession with space...

Artwork