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
Exhibitions
Solo
2022 Cosmic Origami, Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon GA
2021 Hardin Center for Cultural Arts, Gadsen AL
2020 Digital Exhibition Further from Heaven , Curated by Terrell Tillford, Band of Vices,
Los Angeles CA
2019 Anatomy of a Painting, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster CA
2012 Floating Worlds, Wangaratta Gallery, Victoria AUS
Fluids, Gasworks, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
2011 Kingdom, Gallery 775, Redhill, Victoria AUS
Art At Work, Wodonga Council Chambers, New South Wales AUS
Floating Worlds, Frankston Arts Centre, Frankston, Victoria AUS
2009 Falling Sky, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
Falling Sky, Wodonga Art Space, Wodonga, Victoria AUS
Art At Work, Wodonga Council Chambers, Wodonga, Victoria AUS
2002 Tokyo Disney Death Mask, TAP Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
2001 Kaye Freeman, TAP Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
1996 The Tribe, ARDT Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Two Artist
2021 In the Midsts of All That Is, Curated by Terrell Tillford, Band of Vices, Los Angeles CA
2017 New Anatomy, Curated by House of Wren at Castelli Art Space, Los Angeles CA
2002 TAP Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Group
2022 Performance: Lifes, All Fours, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA
Sightlines , Melissa Morgan Fine Arts, Curated by Andi Campognone, Palm Desert CA
Performance: Ladies Lair Lake Created by Trulee Hall at NOMAD Los Angeles CA
2021 C11H17NO3, Curated by Terrell Tillford, Band of Vices, Los Angeles CA
Performance/short film, WOLF, NOMAD, Torrance CA
Multifaceted, Tufenkian Fine Arts, Glendale CA
2020 That Layered Look, Curated by Peter Frank, Tufenkian Fine Arts, Glendale CA
2019 EYE to EYE, Curated by Terrell Tilford, Band of Vices, Los Angeles CA
2018 Clay Contemporary, Norfolk UK
16 Contemporary Artists, Fabrik & Enter Art Foundation, Bonn DE
2017 PAPER perVIEW, Brand Library & Art Center, Glendale CA
2016 Rogue, House of Wren, Los Angeles CA
BG Gallery, Santa Monica CA
2015 At_Salon2, Anita Traverso Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
Words that Matter, Wangaratta Regional Art Gallery, Victoria AUS
2013 “the rest is silence,” Death Be Kind, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
2012 Mount Eyer Art Prize, David Rex Livingston Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Gallery 775, Redhill, Victoria AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
2011 She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
Mount Eyer Art Prize, David Rex Livingston Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
2010 Gallery 775, Redhill, Victoria AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Ballarat Art Gallery, Ballarat, Victoria AUS
Mount Eyer Art Prize, David Rex Livingston Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Williamstown Contemporary Art Prize, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
St. Michael’s Archangel Prize, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
Works On Paper, Brunswick St. Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria US
2009 Small Works, Brunswick St. Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
2007 9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
2006 Albury Regional Art Gallery, Victoria AUS
9x5 Show, Walker St. Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
Fresh & Unframed, Yackandandah Gallery, Victoria AUS
She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
2002 Fluro Show, TAP Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
2001 Buiten, Chiba Municipal Gallery, Chiba Prefecture Japan
1997 Manly Art Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
1996 Leichardt Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Tamworth Art Gallery, New South Wales AUS
1995 Four Women, ARDT Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Temple of The Third Millennium, Urban Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Christmas Show, ARDT, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Awards and Scholarship
2018 Winner, Painting, Beverly Hills Art Fair, Beverly Hills CA
Award, 21st Century Open,Woman Made Gallery, Chicago IL
2010 Winner, She Prize, Walker Street Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria AUS
1996 Winner, Chroma Art Award For graduating Honors, New South Wales AUS
1991 Winner, John Olsen Scholarship, Julian Ashton, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
Art Fairs
2018 Beverly Hills Art Fair
Palm Springs Art Fair wirh Cassera Art Premiers
2017 Los Angeles Art Fair with BG Gallery
Palm Springs Art Fair wirh Cassera Art Premiers
Publications
2022 Art Miami Magazine
2021 Artillery, Review by Benjamin Sutton for In the Midst of All that Is
2019 Turn and Face the Strange: Collaboration with Poet Natasha Dennerstein
Full Blede Broadsheet The Undertaking
Full Blede Broadsheet The Interpenetrate
Full Blede Broadsheet The Continuant
2018 Voyage LA Magazine
North American Review
Full Blede Broadsheet 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
Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio Interview, Words That Matter
2014 Fourteen Hills San Francisco University Press
2012 Wangaratta Chronicle: Artistic Journey Through Dementia
2011 Adelaide Perry Catalogue
Frankston Art Centre Catalogue
2010 Art Almanac Australia
2007 Substation Contemporary Art Prize Catalogue
2000 Ohara Art Buiten Catalogue Japan
Teaching and Artist Talk
2021 Artist Talk Multifaceted: Tufenkian Fine Arts, Glendale CA
2020 Artist Talk Featured as Artist of the Week at Tufenkian Fine Arts Glendale CA
Artist Talk In the Midst of All that Is. Band of Vices Los Angeles CA
2015 Guest Lecturer, Saddleback College, Irvine CA
Guest Lecturer, National Arts School, Sydney, New South Wales AUS
2014 Guest Lecturer, Saddleback College, Irvine CA
Opening Speech and Guest Adjudicator, Wangaratta Jazz Festival Art Prize
Wangaratta Art Gallery, Victoria AUS
2013 Opening Speech, Wangaratta TAFE Graduation Exhibition Wangaratta Art Gallery,
Victoria AUS
2012 Artist in Residence Talk, Wangaratta Art Gallery, Victoria AUS
2011 Artist in Residence Talk, Wodonga Art Gallery, Victoria AUS
2007-13 Art and Japanese Teacher, Wangaratta High School Victoria Education, Victoria AUS
1994-96 Japanese Instructor at Tamworth TAFE New South Wales AUS
1983-89 Contemporary & Classical Dance Instructor, Aboriginal Dance Theatre Sydney, New
South Wales AUS
Education
2008 Bachelor and Diploma of Education, Victoria University, Fine Art and Japanese, Victoria AUS
2006 Monash University, Japanese Linguistic, High Distinction, Victoria AUS
1993-96 Tamworth TAFE: Diploma, Painting & Printmaking, New South Wales AUS
1990-92 Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, New South Wales 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.