MOON WALK
Katie Batten & Eleanor Conover
10.06.23-10.20.2023
Opening Reception | Friday, October 6
6-9 pm
stop-gap projects is pleased to present Moon Walk, a conversation between painters Katie Batten and Eleanor Conover. Longtime friends, Batten and Conover’s distinct painting languages overlap and illuminate each other. For Conover, based in Pennsylvania and Maine, and Batten, based in Wisconsin, painting is a way to navigate the natural world. But the path is not intended to be clear: the artists combine imagery and materials, representation and abstraction, they haze-over and obscure. If these are landscapes at all, they are psychic ones—built somewhere between memory and premonition. It is why, after looking at their paintings for a long time, it is still possible to grapple with seemingly simple questions: Where is the edge? Is it bright or dark? Are we close or far? The tides change; the light is always shifting.
Eleanor: When I look at your paintings, Katie, I do think that they read as both images and things, in a way. But it is a slippery space. Like, is it a painting of a framed painting on a wallpapered wall? Or am I looking at a terrarium sitting on a rug? I’m reminded of a drawing assignment you shared with me once that involves observational collage from values of ink wash on paper. I feel like the paintings are like that—a form of partially collaged reality.Katie: Something I really truly love about your work, Eleanor, is the softness of the stain, combined with the punchiness of the color. Those marks are both passive in form but also assertive in the space that they occupy. And sometimes, you do this thing where these soft and punchy marks live adjacent but not always touching. They feel familiar but also strange, like cobblestones that collaborate to form a path, or the occupants of a tide pool.
Both Batten and Conover re-negotiate the architecture and framing device of painting. For Batten, this appears as patterned borders and vignettes that draw reference from pastoral opera sets and botanical illustration. These perimeters create multiple apertures into luminescent and veiled surfaces. Conover’s shaped paintings bend and bow the color-field. They are familiar and speculative spaces that exist both on and beyond the seeped, porous, and richly pigmented surfaces. As faceted as a piece of granite, as flat-deep as a quarry—like walking at night, her paintings ask your eye to re-adjust to see what is both beneath your feet and in the expanse above.
There is a tenderness to Batten and Conover’s paintings but also a sense of longing—for something or somewhere. Despite their romantic tone and iconography (swans, flowers), Batten’s paintings resist the resolve of allegory. There is too much movement, too much emotion, in the pulsing color and snaking vines for stable meaning. In Conover’s work, the feeling is more structural. Perhaps the aching comes from the splinted armatures and irregular stretcher bars she uses to construct her surfaces, or perhaps it is the “condition of remoteness” she finds in abstraction, of each painting being a version of an island.
Illusion is also a form of longing. We want, simultaneously, to believe the image presented and understand how it is made. To perform a moonwalk is to perform an illusion—the appearance of weightlessness as the body moves both forwards and backwards. It is this back-and-forth that Conover and Batten do so well, and do so well together. Hovering between light and dark, known and unknown, their paintings hinge on a certain type of trust. A trust in the illusion, but also in its instability. It is a complicated and playful dance, one that is more fun to do with a friend.
Katie Batten (b. Chicago, IL, 1990) is an artist and educator living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2012 and an MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art (Temple University) in 2018. She has exhibited across the US and her practice includes painting and ceramics exploring ideas of tenderness and vulnerability. Recent exhibitions include MIAD Gallery at the Avenue, Var Gallery and Yours Truly in Milwaukee. Currently, she serves as the Assistant Director of Graduate Admissions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
Eleanor Conover (b. Hartford, CT, 1988) is an artist whose work engages with the physical and material conditions of painting as a metaphor for environmental time and space. Recent exhibitions include Alice Gauvin Gallery, Portland, ME; Abattoir, Cleveland, OH; Hudson House, Hudson, NY; and Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY. She was the 2022 Donald J. Gordon visiting artist at Swarthmore College, and was the 2020-21 recipient of the Wellesley College Alice C. Cole ’42 fellowship. She earned an MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2018) and a BA from Harvard College (2010). She received a post-MFA teaching fellowship at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and currently resides in Carlisle, PA, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Dickinson College.
