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
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.
CV
Solo Exhibitions
2019 Anatomy of a Painting, curated by and collaborative with Amy Kaps for MOAH Lancaster East Gallery.
2018 Prolepsis of the Archetype, House of Wren, Artsy.net
2016 Art in the Sky, Ritz Carlton, Los Angeles, USA
2012 Floating Worlds, Wangaratta Gallery, AUS
Fluids 液体, 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 Exhibitions
2019 Band of Vices : Eye to Eye, Los Angeles CA
2018 16 Contemporary Artists, Fabrik & Enter Art Foundation, Bonn, DE
Berlin Art Week, Enter Art Foundation permanent Collection, Berlin DE
Clay Contemporary, Norfolk, UK
Art Palm Springs, Cassera Arts Premiers, Palm Springs, USA
LA Art Show, BG Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
2017 Art Palm Springs, Cassera Arts Premiers, Palm Springs, USA
New Anatomy, House of Wren, Castelli Art Space, Los Angeles, USA
2016 Rogue, House of Wren, Los Angeles, USA
2015 BG Gallery, Santa Monica, USA
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
Gallery 775, AUS
2011 9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2010 Gallery 775, AUS
2009 9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
Red Box Charity Auction, Melbourne, AUS
Art@Work, City of Wodonga, AUS
2008 Small Works, Brunswick St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2007 9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
Charity Auction for Refugees, Beechworth, Victoria, AUS
2006 9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
Albury Regional Art Gallery, AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
2002 Two Woman Show, TAP Gallery, Sydney, AUS
2001 Fluro Show, TAP Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Buiten, Chiba Municipal Gallery, Japan
1997 Four Women, ARDT Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Temple of The Third Millennium, Urban Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Christmas Show, ARDT Sydney Elemental
1996 Manly Art Gallery, Sydney, AUS 1996 Leichardt Gallery, Sydney, AUS
Tamworth Art Gallery, AUS
Juried Exhibitions & Awards
2018 Beverly Hills Art Show, Winner
2017 Brand 45: Works on Paper, 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
2007 Williamstown Contemporary Art Prize, Melbourne, AUS
St. Michael’s Archangel Prize, Melbourne, AUS
2006 Works On Paper, Brunswick St. Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, AUS
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, AUS
