Katie Dorame - Other Side

Opening Reception: Saturday July 14th, 6-9 pm

Exhibition Dates: July 14th - August 11th, 2018

Katie Dorame

Other Side

Katie Dorame’s paintings use the lens of early Hollywood to explore histories surround- ing Indigenous peoples, reorienting the spotlight onto these often typecasted actors of color and playfully altering narratives through an ethereal painting process and the ad- dition of masks to further complicate our notions of identity and constructs of the “other”. A conversation with the artist reveals a giddy fascination and encyclopedic knowledge of everything from 80’s B-horror movies to early black and white pictures, this extensive knowledge of film weaving throughout Dorame’s work. The artist’s most recent paintings mine the days of early Hollywood spanning from the early 1910’s through the 1930’s, when actors of color were cast frequently albeit in stereotypical roles.

While much of Dorame’s source material is pulled from the silver screen, the wispy or- ganic forms and glowing softness evoked in the artist’s paintings push these references into an entirely other realm. A muted palette of seafoam green and avocado, earthtones, charcoal greys, cool teal blues and the occasional hits of sickly pink and yellow, com- bined with a scarcity of hard edges give the paintings an almost underwater quality. Their otherworldliness is compounded by the fact that Dorame has chosen to obscure the faces of her subjects with cheap plastic masks or the occasional veil, introducing an entirely new language of oddity for the viewer to decipher.