Katy Dove

Hales Gallery is please to announce Scottish artist Katy Dove’s first solo show at the gallery. For this exhibition, Dove will be presenting two new films and a series of new watercolour paintings on un-primed linen, collaged scrunched drawings and other spontaneous materials.

Katy Dove starts work with a process of intuitive mark making. These initial drawings and watercolours serve as raw material for the animations, watercolour paintings and works on paper. The once isolated elements described in the drawings are scanned into a computer and are duplicated and edited by Dove alongside sound. In some pieces the sound is a pre-composed track, in others Dove composes the score herself, using remixed tracks, everyday sounds, musical instruments and occasionally her voice.

Dove’s work can be interpreted as a kind of aesthetic essentialism, or the distillation of everyday into fundamental shapes, sounds and colours, abstracted to a formal lowest common denominator. In her films these transient elements divide and multiply like primitive cell organisms, before shifting once more into a reverie of movement. It is curiously difficult to pinpoint in Dove’s films whether the music leads or follows the swoops, twirls, dilations and fades of the shapes and colours. This relationship between music and imagery has reoccurred since the beginnings of modernism, from the musical abstractions of Kandinsky to the experimental films of Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye to Pollock’s action paintings made to a soundtrack of American blues and jazz to the more recent abstract paintings by Victoria Morton and installations by Richard Wright, both of whom are Dove’s contemporaries.

Katy Dove lives and works in Glasgow. Dove has recently had a solo show at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and Hales Gallery presented 2 new films by Dove at Art Statements/36/Basel in 2005. She has been included in various group shows such as Combine Platter, MOCA, 2006; The Animators, Angel Row Gallery and Colour after Klein Barbican, 2005; Obstractivist, Hales Gallery, A kind of Bliss (also included works by Len Lye, Lily van der Stokker and Polly Apfelbaum), touring exhibition, 2004; Art Now-Light Box, Tate Britain, London, 2003; Venice Biennale 2003, Zenomap (Scottish screening).

Katy Dove