Kate Newby: I can’t nail the days down

I can’t nail the days down at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz invites people to take a closer look at Kate Newby’s subtle engagements with the exhibition space and its immediate environs. Altering conventional building materials such as bricks, clay, and glass, the newly created sculptures discreetly integrate themselves into the interior and outside space, and embrace minutiae residues of the lived and built surroundings.

Kate Newby is interested in ephemeral and peripheral situations, the informal use of shared spaces as well as the improvised use of materials. Banal objects and details of the quotidian blend into a complex whole, coaxing out the poetic quality of the ordinary.

For Newby, localized details play a crucial role; representing the attempt to understand the world from one's own position and to pay attention to what lies just out of sight. Not only in regards to a physical context but also to a social space the reflection on the detail bears a political dimension. Newby takes up material realities and their details in different intensities—not to replicate existing lifeworlds, but to direct attention to often overlooked aspects in the larger social fabric.

The artist spends a long time to familiarize with places. Her delicate, highly informed interventions speak of people’s use of a site, it’s ephemeral histories and invisible sediments.

For her solo exhibition Kate Newby has produced a large-scale brick sculpture installed on the floor of Kunsthalle Wien’s glass pavilion. Glass shards and coins found nearby were inserted into the bricks and activate a detailed texture. Ceramic and bronze items such as small stones and twigs, which turn out—only upon closer inspection—to be handmade objects complement the installation. Hanging glass objects refract the incoming light and allow it to become part of the work. The reflection encourages the viewers’ gaze to wander outside and discover Newby’s intervention made of handmade ceramic tiles inserted into the ground of the adjacent park. Throughout various weather conditions the sculpture will absorb remains from the outside world—leaves, rainwater, debris–continuously involving the environment in the work. 

Newby's works celebrate the moment in which her sculptures and interventions are created and presented, and at the same time allow for an openness to change. Drawn from impressions she collects when navigating cities and landscapes, Newby’s works foreground processes: Traces of their making remain visible, they incidentally transform over time and call for active engagement in order to view their multifaceted details.

Her works focus on the fleeting and contingent nature of the quotidian and stay connected to the place and time of their presentation. They are based on observational research and immediate responses toward sites. Materializations of how the artist perceives the world around her, they invite us to take a closer look and discover what is situated out of sight.  

Curator: Juliane Bischoff

Kate Newby (*1979 in Auckland, New Zealand) lives and works in Auckland and Brooklyn, New York. In 2012 she was awarded the renowned Walter’s Prize. Newby graduated with a Doctor of Fine Arts (2015) from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. Her solo exhibitions include Swift little verbs pushing the big nouns around, Michael Lett, Auckland (2018); Let me be the wind that pulls your hair, Artpace, San Antonio (2017); The January February March, The Poor Farm, Wisconsin (2016); Two aspirins a vitamin C tablet and some baking soda, Laurel Doody, Los Angeles (2015); I feel like a truck on a wet highway, Lulu, Mexico City (2014); Maybe I won‘t go to sleep at all., La Loge, Brussels (2013); and Let the other thing in, Fogo Island Gallery, Newfoundland (2013); among others. Her works have also been shown in international group exhibitions, including at the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); Scrap Metal, Toronto (2017); Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2017); SculptureCenter, New York (2017); Casa del Lago, Mexico City (2015); Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland (2015); and Arnolfini, Bristol (2014).