Katie Garth

Website: www.katiegarth.com
Instagram: @katiegarth

BIOGRAPHY

Katie Garth is an artist in Philadelphia with a print-based practice that emphasizes language and circulation. She was a printing assistant at the Silver Buckle Press, and worked as a Senior Designer at Planet Propaganda before receiving an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art (2020). Garth has exhibited internationally, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post and Print Magazine. She co-founded the Quarantine Public Library with Tracy Honn and currently teaches drawing at Kutztown University.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In an increasingly frenetic world, my work explores everyday impulses for order, positioning routine as a vehicle for escapism and an artificial instrument of control. As I depict tensions between the everyday lived experience and the otherworldly and sublime, I frame these seemingly contradictory dimensions as interdependent realms. Across media including prints, books, and installations, I incorporate graphic lexicons, ephemeral imagery, and language fragments as symbols for the power and possibility of redundancy.

ARTIST'S WORK

BEST LAID PLANS
Best Laid Plans positions a self-published artist’s book as the central object in an immersive narrative environ-ment. Across cyanotypes, installations, paper sculptures, and risographs, this body of work explores domestic routine as a coping mechanism for chaos and uncertainty, and depicts imagined disembodiment as the ulti-mate escapist fantasy.

The book’s narrative empathizes with the impulse for escapism, while also examining what is lost by with-drawing into oneself. Within a childhood story about my personal tendency for order, I consider the merits of planning, asking for what each of us may be preparing, and noting how familiar objects and mundane rituals provide their own enduring appeal.

Best Laid Plans, Artist’s book, Risograph-printed and wire bound 5 x 7 x 0.5”, open ed., 2020

The Ground Beneath My Feet, Cyanotype on mulberry, 22 x 30”, 2020

Inventory, Risograph prints, 8 x 10” ea., 2020

No Pockets, Cyanotype on mulberry, 30 x 22”, 2020

PUBLIC LANGUAGE
This installation series addresses the meaninglessness and ubiquity of trite phrases used by government figures and other institutional leaders throughout our most recent global crises. Using vinyl text, I applied these fragments across empty commercial shop windows throughout my neighborhood in Center City, Philadelphia. Made large and plain, but rendered in my own handwriting, the work asked viewers to consider how this language had interrupted even their own personal correspondence.

Public Language I, Public installation (vinyl text) Dimensions variable, 2020

Public Language II, Public installation (vinyl text) Dimensions variable, 2020

RITUAL
In another risograph-printed book, Ritual, I consider the absurdity of everyday magical thinking, in which one performs mundane tasks ceremonially as an attmept to influence larger circumstances. The story specifically highlights how fears about large-scale, abstract threats (in this case, climate change) are often processed by way of small, concrete actions, like making one’s bed.

Ritual, Artist’s book, Risograph-printed and perfect bound 9 x 12 x 0.5”, ed. 20, 2018