On the Head of a Pin
Revisiting the year’s visual arts: Katherine Vetne’s show at Gallery 5
Watch the slide show above to see images from Matters of Fact and hear Katherine Vetne talk about her work.
Some pieces hang in a museum for centuries, others never make it out of a studio. Some reside on stretched canvas, others on an urban wall. Some rely on paint, others on electrons. But all good art deserves more than one good look. So this week, we’re resurrecting some of our arts coverage from the academic year just concluded, offering one a day — vitamins for the spirit.
Stepping off the elevator into the College of Fine Arts Gallery 5, the room seems empty — three black paintings on one wall, a row of tiny pieces on another, a swirl of blue on the third.
But step closer, and take another look at Katherine Vetne’s unusual work.
“My focus right now is lots of tiny little details that accumulate to make bigger pieces,” says Vetne (CFA’09). “I’m taking a new approach, where instead of thinking about my pieces as interpretations, I’m thinking, this is what it is, this is how I see it.”
In Matters of Fact, black paintings show pinpoints like patterns of a constellation. In the row of 50 smaller works, each holds a feather, each line drawn with silverpoint. And the swirl of blue is actually tiny circles, formed to shape a galaxy model, drawn directly on the wall.
“I actually sat in front of the wall for a week with a ballpoint pen and some food,” she says. “It doesn’t bother me that it will be painted over, as long as I get a photograph first.”
This story originally ran March 20, 2009.
Kimberly Cornuelle can be reached at kcornuel@bu.edu.
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