Kate Newby is an artist of the immediate and quotidian. Her work is rooted in place, which she defines through the conditions, actions, and events that occur there. Her investment in the local is often expressed through site-specificity. This exhibition gives its viewers insight into how the artist navigates distance, when proximity is so integral to her practice. In this way, “As far as you can” reads as a conceptual challenge to herself during a pandemic.

But still LOVE this, 2020. Porcelain, silk thread, handmade wool rope, 13.5 x 10 in (34.29 x 25.4 cm)

With a porcelain wind chime and four environmental soft ground etchings, Newby devises recording devices that embrace the random conditions surrounding the creation and reception of her work. But still LOVE this is sensitive to the flux of the everyday, registering movement and the elements as an ephemeral sonic recording, at least theoretically. In reality, I found that the sculpture remained indifferent to my presence, the adjacent open window, and nearby fan. The wind chime, a recurring form in Newby’s work, strives to encourage attentiveness to the here and now. With her etchings, she drops her gaze to the ground. Created in dialogue with their surroundings, these works harness the aleatory. Copper plates coated in a thin layer of a wax substance and left outside at night, sometimes surrounded by bird feed, are marked by the actions of visitors. These unchoreographed gestures become embedded in the surface. The resulting print serves as a record of movement and traces left by the environment, a history of that place at that time.

New Guy, Shadow, Carrots One and Carrots Two, 2018. Soft ground etching, 22.8 x 18.2 in (57.9 x 46.2 cm).

The etchings, which were composed during Texas residencies at Artpace and the Chinati Foundation between 2017 and 2018, memorialize the situational and performative. Between Flavin and the Horn is sparse, as if pecked at the edges by birds. At Chinati, the works in the museum’s contemporary art collection are installed in separate buildings or outdoor areas. I suspect that the physical placement of this plate on the ground fell between the works of its eponyms Dan Flavin and Roni Horn, fellow sculptors whose precise significance to the artist, if any, remains unclear. The other three works on paper track the feet of animals—claw scratches, paw prints, the heel of a shoe. Pockmarked like skin and dense, Just be prepared (backyard, birds, Southtown) represents a violent, chaotic flurry. A sum of calls and responses, “As far as you can” reflects an inclination to capture the fleeting and the ordinary with similar urgency.

Kate Newby 
As far as you can 
July 1, 2020 – July 15, 2020
Feuilleton (1440 Logan St., Apt. 1, Los Angeles, CA 90026).