Kay Whitney is known for making objects that function at the intersection of art and craft. For the past decade she has been making constructions and installations from plywood, industrial felt and cable. She is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in Los Angeles.

She has taught at Kansas City Art Institute, University of New Mexico, University of Chicago, Art Center College of Design and the University of Texas and is proud of having taught numerous women how to weld.

She has been a visiting artist at institutions including Cooper Union, Maryland Art Institute and the California College of the Arts. She has received grants from the McCune Foundation, California International Arts Foundation and a Performance Grant from the Target Foundation.

Whitney has contributed work to national and international exhibitions. Her work has been shown at venues such as the Craft Contemporary in L.A.; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Center for Contemporary Arts, Dallas TX; Newport Harbor Art Museum, CA; Museum Schloss Holdenstedt, Uelzen,Germany. Her work is in numerous collections – a large cable construction was recently purchased by the San Antonio Museum of Art.

She has authored numerous catalogs and is a regular contributor to Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics Monthly and other arts publications.

QUESTION:

Your sculpture, for the most part, exposes the way it has been made. They are clearly the aggregation of repetitive tasks. Repetition is not only evident in your process but you often repeat shapes within one piece and similar forms recur within a series of distinct sculptures. The use of repetition has a long history in the arts from the creation of visual rhythms in decorative patterns to the philosophical repudiation of hierarchy in the work of the classic minimalists. The function of repetition in visual art varies as much as visual art itself. How does repetition manifest itself in your work and what does it mean to you? Are there other artists who use repetition that inspire you?

ANSWER:

Although it may be a form of hoarding, repetition is a way to keep everything – to preserve your actions. Without it, I feel that the object is cut off, marooned from the very thing that links it back to me, its performer, director and producer. I’m not interested in performing the kind of labor that erases itself. That seems to me to be a kind of suppression; it orphans the object, cuts off from what makes it vital, makes it just another thing among things. Exposing process sites the maker within the object, yanking it from the ocean of the mass-produced, giving an object juice. Repetition raises the noise level of fabrication making the object it permeates the loudest thing in the room.

4 devices for a somnambulist 2019 (off center view)

I’ve come to think of art objects as the repository of accumulated gestures. It’s that notion that’s brought me to where I am with my work – making objects that offer evidence of the way they’ve been made. Their appearance is made denser and more complicated by merging what they represent conceptually with the way they’re fabricated. My process includes variations on the basic gestures of bundling, wrapping, knotting, suspending. In my work, repetition makes and unmakes itself simultaneously through spatial discontinuities, disruptions of rhythm, shifts from wrapping to tying, releasing the felt from the restriction of the contours.

Kay Whitney INSEMINATORS, 2020;8′ x’ 2′ x 6′; cable., felt, plywood

My work is complicated in terms of surface but is also restrained by a narrowness of means – it’s felt and plywood and aircraft cable; for the past 3 years it’s been involved with some variation on the circle and oval. Because my work is so tied to gesture and so based on the way fabric bunches and drapes, these forms refer to a notional female body – its folds, bulges, hidden surfaces and concavities, the weight and fall of flesh.
Although my index of gestures seems derived from minimalist vocabulary, I’m more attuned to the kind of work Harmony Hammond produced early on as well as to the work of Phyllida Barlow. There’s no connection between the kind of labor I put into my work and the now rather tired notion of ‘women’s work’ – but I’m well aware of the feminist foundations of my work and my debt to artists like Louise Bourgeois, Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse.

Kay Whitney “23 false starts” 2018, felt, plywood, hardware, stainless steel, 8′ x 10′ x 10″