Like pages torn from an eerily amorous storybook, Kate Stringer’s images interlace together a world of feminized creatures, markings and graphic narrative. smoke the moon will debut a solo presentation of the Santa Fe artist’s graphite illustration and watercolors in our Casita Gallery. Coupling sensual, chimeric scenes of intimacy with haunted layers of fine detail Stringer’s layered compositions invite dark daydreaming. There are powerful truths interwoven with fantastical imaginings throughout the show. Violence and beauty merge together in a face we know yet have never seen before.

Stringer was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in New England, studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art before moving west to Santa Fe. While in school she studied ceramics, a medium that has heartbreak embedded in the process; pieces break, warp and crack at any moment, and the process yields to begin again. 

Stringer transmuted this physical love of layering clay to an exploration of reducing her material while maintaining a richly textured creative sphere. For the last 5 years Stringer has been working intently with pencil and paper, developing a detailed practice with graphite. Pink Noise will also debut a series of watercolors that expand on and begin a new conversation with the artist’s illustrative practice.

Much like the grain and wash of analog photography, Kate Stringer’s work is deceptively simple. Tonal ranges in the graphite compositions produce a potent emotional schema in her drawings. Stringer has a fully fleshed folk lore to the world she illustrates. In “A Cruel Heart Trick” (graphite on bristol) a figure somewhere between angel and monster floats in greyscale. Nearly human, the figure is adorned in washes of pattern, framed by stippled flames and some winding forest that is just out of focus. In other illustrations bodies tangle up together, simultaneously grotesque and loving, a devotion to the sacred and profane. Stringer’s work articulates a particularly intricate feminized experience- venom and softness, embodiment and disembodiment creating a poignant visual universe.