Kate Gilmore at Smith-Stewart

Kate Gilmore opened this Friday, Nov.21 at Smith-Stewart in the incredibly small space of her dealer's gallery. Visitors stepped in from the freezing cold through a series of Gilmore's, at this point, near trademark busted-up drywalls for the opportunity of meeting the winner of the Rome prize and catching bits of three of her videos (Between a Hard Place, Down the House, and Higher Horse, all 2008). Packed to the point of immobility, it was difficult to view the work (but when is an opening a good time for viewing the work), affording a real-time sense of the claustrophobia immanent in much of Gilmore's work.

Gilmore is smart. And her work is smart. It is aggressive and beautiful and draws on some of the greatest lineages of art history, critiquing and extending the legacies of performance, process, feminist, and masculinist art. Each of Gilmore's pieces is a performance as well as a film (which documents the performance) in which the artist casts herself as the protagonist, often battling walls or blocks of concrete and wood. Higher Horse shows Gilmore standing on a column of plaster blocks in high heels while two men slash away at the pile of blocks around her with sledgehammers. In Down the House, we see Gilmore from above, ribbon in her hair, smashing debris all around her, again with a sledgehammer. In Between a Hard Place (the work created for Gilmore's solo show at the Philadelphia ICA, curated by Whitney Lauder curatorial fellow Stamatina Gregory), Gilmore batters her way through a series of drywalls wearing high heels and a dress, this time with only her hands and feet.

It's wonderful to see a feminine figure being so forceful, but of course there are intimations here that this force is not desired by its subject, but instead necessary. She is trapped and must fight her way out. Oddly, she does so in an almost calm, methodical manner, as if she's been doing this forever. Worse, "out" may not even exist; the struggle may be endless, or perhaps it is just that no end is in sight. In Down the House, the house may be crumbling, but the screen fades to black before Gilmore can free herself. In Between a Hard Place, the rock is implied. Gilmore fights through multiple gray walls only to be met with a final yellow wall. In Higher Horse, she survives the assault (or rescue) but her situation remains precarious. She might come down off her high horse...if only she could.

Gilmore alludes to the social and the political incisively. Strikingly, however, she does not negate beauty, leaving it as an open question in her work, asking for its interrogation. Each performance has an elegant chromatic theme. Yellow heels match the yellow wall (and the reverse sides of the gray drywall indicating an alternate side of things), red ones rhyme with red drips down the wall behind the plaster column, and a pink hair ribbon reverberates with wet, pink paint. Gilmore's colors are attributes of femininity, but also of architecture; they are applied and not inherent. They are excessive, but not unimportant. They are also indicators of the legacy of the monochrome--the Utopian gesture towards a One thing, a full presence, or a no presence.

Gilmore herself embodies and enacts Lucio Fontana's, his Spatial Concepts, his buchi and tagli.
She steps through, breaks through, again and again, hoping, fighting for something beyond.

http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/gilmore.php