If you live a full life, then your life is full of epiphanies. San Antonio artist Katie Pell, whose exhibition with the utterly charming title “Tiny Acts of Immeasurable Benefit” opens at Women & Their Work next week, had just such an epiphany a couple of years ago.
For most of her artistic life, Pell was a visual artist working in acrylic. In other words, she was a painter. “And then a few years ago,” says Pell, “a friend asked me to be in a show, and the theme was chairs. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of not for me, ’cause I’m not gonna make some crafty chair.’ So I staged a Mexican chair fight. I drew a chalk circle, attached the chairs to fishing wire, operated them like marionettes from these ladders, and I photographed all the people gambling and betting on these fighting chairs. The neighborhood I live in has a lot places where Spanish is sort of written outside on the stores, and I took the photos there, and people at the show asked: ‘Where did you photograph this? Where did you see this? Where in Mexico was this?’ And I got such a kick out of that because, you know, chairs don’t fight in Mexico.
“We’re not really seeing what’s there. We’re using what’s there as a visual cue to define other things through that image. And I became really interested in that idea. That really was transformative for me.”
So transformative that Pell now considers herself as much storyteller as visual artist. “I try to do inspirational. The stories that interest me are stories that are inspirational and yet ambiguously beneficial. Like it’s not really clear whether any progress has been made, whether something is good or bad. I try to express the complicated nature of life.”
Such will be exactly the case in “Tiny Acts,” which consists of 40 screen prints, typically simply drawn figures such as three mushrooms and a butterfly accompanied by text such as: “You deserve more love. Don’t lie any more.” Most interestingly, the exhibition contains five sculptures, three of which the audience can choose to interact with – or not. “I don’t encourage anything,” says Pell. “People just end up interacting with them. I don’t forbid it, nor do I encourage it. I don’t want to make it like some theme show. I’m not trying to get everybody to come and clown around or anything. Usually, somebody gets inspired.”
Talking with Pell, you can understand why people might get inspired, if even the slightest smidgen of the positive energy and intense commitment she exhibits in her conversation finds its way into her art. “I want to celebrate us. I want us all to get a little positive feedback and feel good. I want to make work that, when you interact with it, you can have this transformative experience by being in it. You become the art, and you are also physically in a position of openness and exposure. You’re making yourself vulnerable to all these strangers, and we’re all in it together.”
“Katie Pell: Tiny Acts of Immeasurable Benefit” is on display Aug. 7-Sept. 13 at Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca. For more information, visit www.womenandtheirwork.org.
This article appears in August 1 • 2008.