Through painting and drawing I fold and unfold the myths that surround us like a cosmic origami.
Capturing the frenetic nature of the ether through lines and colours borrowed and blended from a hybrid of cultures.
Our commonality as humans is essential in my dialogue, as I push through aesthetic norms of acceptability and taste. Memories, myths and shared emotions weave through my paintings, abstracted and reshaped again and again until we come to see that our humanity is what humbles us and sustains us. Capturing the constant oceanic movement of what it means to move through a life. To capture the ineffable in paint and graphite. To resonate with a truth that lies beneath all our embellishments. My work is more than a representation of a thing, it is the thing. And it continues to evolve long after I am finished with it, because the viewer then takes it to their own place of understanding and experience. For it is then that the painting becomes the relationship and the journey.
Kaye Freeman
CV
Now
Solo
Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon GA USA
Group
Multifaceted at Tufenkian Fine Arts
Past Exhibitions
Solo
2021 Hardin Center for Cultural Arts, Gadsen AL USA
2020 Digital Exhibition (due to the pandemic):
Further from Heaven Band of Vices, LA
2019 Anatomy of a Painting, curated by Amy Kaps for MOAH Lancaster East Gallery
2012 Floating Worlds, Wangaratta Gallery, AUS
Fluids, Gasworks, Melbourne, AUS
2011 Kingdom, Gallery 775, AUS
Floating Worlds, Frankston Arts Centre, AUS
2009 Falling Sky, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
Falling Sky, Wodonga Art Space, AUS
Art At Work, Wodonga Council Chambers, AUS
2002 Tokyo Disney Death Mask, TAP Gallery, Sydney, AUS
2001 Kaye Freeman, TAP Gallery, Sydney, AUS
1996 The Tribe, ARDT Gallery Sydney, AUS
Group
2021 C11H17NO3 at Band of Vices
NOMAD Torrance Art Museum
Two artist show: In the Midsts of All That Is, Band of Vices, LA USA
2020 Museum Program Exhibition Curated by Cross Contemporary Partners
Maiden LA Open Studio
That Layered Look, Tufenkian Fine Arts LA curated by Peter Frank
2019 EYE to EYE, Band of Vices, LA
2018 Clay Contemporary, Norfolk, UK
16 Contemporary Artists, Fabrik & Enter Art Foundation, Bonn, DE
2017 Two Artist Show: New Anatomy, curated by House of Wren at Castelli Art Space LA
2016 Rogue, House of Wren, Los Angeles, USA
BG Gallery, Santa Monica, USA
2015 At_Salon2, Anita Traverso Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
Words that Matter, Wangaratta Regional Art Gallery, AUS
2014 Venice Art Walk, Los Angeles, USA
2013 “the rest is silence,” Death Be Kind, Melbourne, AUS
2011 Gallery 775, AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2010 Gallery 775, AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2009 Small Works, Brunswick St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2007 9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2006 Albury Regional Art Gallery, AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
Fresh & Unframed, Yackandandah Gallery, Victoria, AUS
2002 Two Artist Show: TAP Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Fluro Show, TAP Gallery, Sydney, AUS
2001 Buiten, Chiba Municipal Gallery, Japan
1997 Manly Art Gallery, Sydney, AUS
1996 Leichardt Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Tamworth Art Gallery, AUS
1995 Four Women, ARDT Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Temple of The Third Millennium, Urban Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Christmas Show, ARDT Sydney AUS
Art Fairs
2018 Beverly Hills Art Fair
Palm Springs Art Fair wirh Cassera Art Premiers
2017 LA Art Fair with BG Gallery LA
Palm Springs Art Fair wirh Cassera Art Premiers
Publication/Press
2020 Artillery Magazine
Featured as Artist of the Week at Tufenkian Fine Arts: Instagram interview.
2019 Turn and Face the Strange: Collaboration with Poet Natasha Dennerstein
Published by Norfolkpress
Full Blede: The Undertaking
Full Blede: The Interpenetrate
Full Blede : The Continuant
2018 Voyage LA Magazine
North American Review
Full Blede: The Parapraxis
2017 “About A Girl” By Natasha Dennerstein (Book Cover Art)
Creative Boom Magazine
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art
Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam
2015 Australian Ceramics Magazine
ABC Radio Interview Words That Matter
2014 Fourteen Hills SF University Press http://14hills.net/content/volume-211-2015
Critical Essays regarding works from the Collaboration with Natasha Dennerstein
by Chelsea Maradiega, Natasha Tansey, Jan-Henry Gray and Ryan Nash
2012 Wangaratta Chronicle “Artistic Journey Through Dementia” 2011
Adelaide Perry Catalogue & Website
Frankston Art Centre Catalogue
2010 Art Almanac Australia
2007 Substation Contemporary Art Prize Catalogue
2000 Ohara Art Buiten Catalogue Japan
Auctions
2020 CAMP UBUNTU LA USA
Bid 4 Biden LA USA
2018 CASA LA Charity auction LA USA
2010 Red Box Charity Auction for refugees , Melbourne, AUS
2008 Charity Auction for Refugees, Beechworth, Victoria, AUS
Collaboration/ Short Films
2021 Shiosai Short Film shown at Comeback Festival Art Share LA
HibiscusTV: with Amy Kaps
WOOD a short film shown at Comeback Festival Art Share LA
2019 Turn and Face the Strange: with Natasha Dennersteing. Published by Norfolk Press
Juried Exhibitions
2018 Winner, Painting, Beverly Hills Art Fair USA
Second Place, 21st Century Open,Woman Made Gallery Chicago USA
2017 PAPER perVIEW, Brand Library & Art Center, Glendale, USA
2012 Mount Eyer Art Prize, David Rex Livingston Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, Sydney, AUS
2011 She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
Mount Eyer Art Prize, David Rex Livingston Gallery, Sydney, AUS
2010 Winner, She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Ballarat Art Gallery, AUS
Mount Eyer Art Prize, David Rex Livingston Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Williamstown Contemporary Art Prize, Melbourne, AUS
St. Michael’s Archangel Prize, Melbourne, AUS
Works On Paper, Brunswick St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2007 She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2006 She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
1996 Winner, Chroma Art Award For Outstanding Student Work, NSW, AUS
1991 Winner, John Olsen Scholarship, Julian Ashton, Sydney, AUS
1988 Winner, Best Female Performer, Festival of New Australian Theatre, Sydney,
Teaching and Artist Talk
2020 Band of Vices
Tufenkian Fine Arts
2015 Guest Lecturer, Saddleback College, CA, USA
Guest Lecturer, National Arts School, Sydney,
2014 Guest Lecturer, Saddleback College, CA, USA
Opening Speech and Guest Adjudicator, Wangaratta Jazz Festival Art Competition
2013 Opening Speech, Wangaratta TAFE Exhibition at Wangaratta Art Gallery, AUS
2012 Artist in Residence Talk, Wangaratta Art Gallery, AUS 2011
Artist in Residence Talk, Wodonga Art Gallery, AUS
2007-13 Art and Japanese Teacher, Wangaratta High School Victoria Education, AUS
1994-96 Japanese Instructor at Tamworth TAFE AUS
1983-89 Contemporary & Classical Dance Instructor, Aboriginal Dance Theatre Redfern AUS
Education
2008 Bachelor and Diploma of Education, Victoria University, Fine Art and Japanese, AUS
2006 Monash University, Japanese Linguistic Equivalency Examination, High Distinction, AUS
1993-96 Tamworth TAFE: Diploma, Painting & Printmaking, AUS
1990-92 Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, AUS
Vernon, Oil paint on canvas, 42 x 47 inches, 2019.
Kaye Freeman's L.A. Ecosystems
By Annabel Osberg
Kaye Freeman's "City Scapes" express Los Angeles as a peculiar ecosystem where beauty and harshness are inextricably intermeshed. Ranging from monumental paintings to diminutive drawings, her urban landscapes appear as febrile daydreams of vibrant color, topsy-turvy movement, and frenetic energy. Architectural edges tilt, cables wobble, and streets dissolve in free-flowing compositions where fanciful vignettes melt into one another as hallucinatory mirages. Softening urban infrastructure's linear geometry, Freeman presents the city as a sprawling indefinite organism whose lifeblood is a squiggled network of freeways, power lines, and telecommunication wires.
Just as Los Angeles' glamorous skyline ensconces dismal poverty, Freeman's whimsical style and dazzling palette of fluorescents and pastels belie darker significance.
This is especially apparent in her largest cityscape, DTLA as the Garden of Earthly Delights (2017). Titled after Hieronymus Bosch's apocalyptic magnum opus, this 30-foot triptych represents the city's perpetual birth, life, and death. Disintegration and construction progress sequentially from left to right through the triptych, while also occurring simultaneously from top to bottom in each painting; the fluctuant city is constantly regenerating. In the leftmost canvas, Santee Alley, tenuous cranes precariously dangle a tottering block of buildings high above upside-down trousers evoking corpses. Nearby, faces, inspired by masks of peoples indigenous to various world regions, represent the city's buried cultural foundation. In the central canvas, mountains of skyscrapers appear relatively halcyon; but in the final painting, Skid Row Diamond Dogs, dwindling skylines are encircled by ramshackle tents and preponderant vagrants painted in shadowy deep violets that jar the rest of the triptych's high-keyed hues.
Freeman's easel-sized streetscapes more compendiously crystallize her impressions of frantic urban uncanniness. Writhing overpasses erratically peak and dip like nightmarish roller coasters. Grimy gray graphite lines intersect blotchy celestial color fields of intermittently scabrous surfaces. Reeling high-rises perilously whirl under hot pink suns evoking bullet holes agape in golden skies. Expressionistic crimson brushstrokes evoke a bloody mess in Red 405 (2018), where a fetally hunched homeless figure doggedly wheels through the fuscous margins of a sanguine freeway river.
Hints of religious iconography insinuate ruin and redemption. Betokening mastery, telephone and power poles appear as crosses while also recalling slack-stringed marionette controllers. City of Angels (2018) portrays a scrawled white mystical form hovering above skeletal transients huddled in the umbra of glowing skyscrapers.
As a recent immigrant, Freeman asserts her own cosmopolitan background in allusions to Los Angeles' multiculturalism. She signs her drawings with her kanji seal and incorporates a recurring character inspired by the notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly.
Despite her cynicism, Freeman's ambition to portray Los Angeles through her copious collection of colorful cityscapes seems celebratory at heart. This exuberant painting series leaves little doubt that for the artist, living in LA is a dream come true.