Artist47: Katie Grinnan

Katie Grinnan's Mirage piece shows her body as she explores space and her physical nature and limits. Each pose within the spectrum of the piece illustrates a moment in time as her body moves through the yoga routine represented by the sculpture. This is another very physical, tangible piece along the same lines as the concepts driving Tony Orrico and  Juliana Cerqueria Leite's work, where the body and its nature is the focus of the work. Here's the artist's statement from her exhibition with Brennan & Griffin last year that articulates the concept really well:

Mirage, in many ways, forms a counterpoint to Brainwaves. The sculpture focuses on the experiential nature of the body and is formed from casting Grinnan’s own body moving through the different positions of a portion of her yoga routine. The resulting form is both an approximation of motion and a solid thing, a singular figure and many. While Brainwaves focuses on the mind and its potential boundaries, Mirage focuses on the concept of peripersonal space, the space that your body encompasses at its most extended point in every direction, which describes the body’s potential boundary. Although one might consider the artist, Étienne-Jules Marey as a reference point for Mirage, the Hindu sculptures from South India, where different gods are portrayed with multiple limbs are of equal importance. Both references reflect Grinnan’s interest in the expansion and compression of time and “everyday superposition.”

Her Brainwaves piece serves as an effective conceptual foil to the Mirage sculpture, providing balance to her body of work. The sculpture focuses on the mind, not the body, as it reaches outward in an effort to organize and understand. The statement from Brennan & Griffin:

Brainwaves reflects the search for structure and form within complex systems such as the brain and the universe that resist resolution and are largely speculative. The piece explores the fluid process by which one’s subjectivity sculpts the environment and reciprocally the environment sculpts one’s thoughts. This process operates simultaneously on intimate and vast levels permeating many different kinds of space. The immense ocean of information consisting of multiple perspectives is ultimately filtered and translated through personal experience, revealing a singular yet composite self, which is then projected back into the world and is always present and constantly changing.

I don't usually like to just copy and paste whole artist's statements like that, but Brennan & Griffin articulated the complexities of Grinnan's work really well. I like Grinnan's search for similarities between the body and the mind. The idea behind expressing each in her work is quite similar, though the products are quite different. Definitely a cool set of sculptures and concepts.