Unison is delighted to present a show of new paintings and monotypes by multidisciplinary artist Kathy Goodell. Goodell studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, moved to New York in the 1980s and has been a Unison neighbor since 2005. Her numerous awards include support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation (2013). Goodell is a longtime SUNY New Paltz professor of painting and drawing, and mentor to a generation of students.
Goodell’s education, and much of her body of work, is in sculpture, often involving the manipulation of light through careful placement of sheet glass, lenses, mirrored surfaces and silicone. In her watercolor and gouache works we witness a related, complex layering of translucent color; but water as harness of light allows an unparalleled freedom and potential for spontaneous physical response. Exploring ideas of structure, which she describes as the “fragile membrane of containment”, Goodell builds unique, experimental systems in negotiation with the terms of each specific material container - often within the deckled rectangles of handmade papers - in fluid layers that preclude total control.
A long-term interest in repetition and the motion of time surfaces in these new works as a set of reflections on the complex, cyclical and often contradictory trajectory of relationships. Goodell’s immediate bodily responses, honed by decades of experimentation, translate into vibrant marks and washes laid down on horizontal surfaces and approached from multiple angles while in progress. Post-evaporation, we are faced with the urgent, playful, reflective traces of a deep journey into the nature of the human psyche and its glorious defiance of the linear.