Higher Pictures is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Kate Steciw. This is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery.

In this new body of work, Steciw builds on her ongoing practice of using images sourced online to explore the reciprocal relationships between physical objects, digital representations, and the mechanisms of their distribution and display. Steciw’s process of logic is guided by intuition but shaped by the vagaries of search engine logic; selecting one image, she follows visual and conceptual cues—loosely delineated by the list of search terms in the works’ titles—to find others until she has a small series of nebulously correlated pictures. She then variably layers, rotates, alters, and re-layers the image files, generating a virtually infinite number of unique compositions. The works on view all derive from the same photographs extracted from the Internet taken through this process of digital compositing, printing, and then imbedding them into mixed-media sculptural fields.

In Steciw’s work, the most anonymous reproductions become generative. The stock image file is the formal and conceptual point of departure for an exploration of color, shape, space, and weight that determines the composition of the final sculptures. Echoes and extensions of contours, hues, and patterns found within the reproductions appear in the physical elements of the work and sections of the frame blend back into the image. Steciw cuts, excises, layers, builds up, and builds out the framing components and alternately obscures and reveals the image behind tinted plexiglass superimposing a sculptural collage onto the original digital pastiche. Representation and object are conceptually inextricable, but in the space they enter into a lively push and pull.

Kate Steciw (b. 1978, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) holds a BA from Smith College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Steciw has exhibited her art extensively in New York, most recently in group exhibitions at the International Center of Photography (What Is a Photograph?), Hauser & Wirth (Fixed Variable), Johannes Vogt Gallery (Material Images), and Eyebeam (The New Romantics). Recent solo exhibitions include Actife Plassity at Neumeister Bar-Am in Berlin, New Custom Wall Art at Annarumma Gallery in Naples, and Debaser at Levy Delval in Brussels. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, and Interview magazine. Steciw lives and works in Brooklyn.

For more information please contact Patrick Lloyd at 212.249.6100.