Kate Dodd: You're Invited!

A resident of Orange, NJ, Kate Dodd (b. 1960) is well known for her many public art commissions throughout the Garden State and elsewhere. _You're Invited_ is an immersive site-specific installation in the Laurie Art Stairway, made primarily of excess printed Montclair Art Museum materials, that fully engages viewers in a sculptural experience that they can walk through. Conceptually, the work invites the viewer to contemplate the role of museums as stewards of art. By using repurposed materials, Dodd also encourages visitors to think about waste, environmental degradation, and our consumer culture. The installation is constructed from thousands of paper strips assembled into a web of quilt-like patterns draped over an arched structure, which encloses the length of the stairway and then curves upwards again to spread across multiple windows. By emphasizing the stairs' processional flow, the abundance of light, the transparency of the enclosure, and the monumental scale of the interior, the architectural attributes of the Museum's extension are fully celebrated. Like many of her other temporary installations, Kate sees this type of work as being closer to an event than to a permanent art object. Besides addressing the question of art as a transactional commodity, this transient method of creating in response to the unique physical parameters of each venue requires her to build structures that are specific to that site yet can be easily dismantled. Kate's solution to these requirements has been to build using many small pieces that can cohere to site conditions while combining to achieve monumental scale. Her interest in labor and processes, necessary for this kind of work, evolved out of her personal history as an artist. Growing up in an artistic family in which making of any kind was a central activity, she found sewing satisfied the need to "create something out of nothing". The mending aspects of sewing also inform her creativity as part of "the impulse to heal, to make broken or discarded materials okay, the resurrection and repurposing of what has been tossed aside." Her ongoing practice of cutting and constructing networks is inspired by diverse sources, from the geometry of Moroccan tiles to patterns found in nature. "You're Invited!" encompasses a variety of themes in Dodd's past work, such as the tension between illusionistic two-dimensional surfaces vs three-dimensional form in real space, abstraction vs representation, and appropriation vs originality. The reuse of museum materials comes from her stated desire "to repurpose, rather than discard, what we produce." Engaging with contemporary issues of single use overconsumption and an information saturated digital environment, Dodd has observed: _Sorting through, cutting up, and recombining this material is a form of processing it: in part, it reflects the struggle to deal with information overload. It is so difficult at this moment in human development to fully focus on one thing at a time, whether it's artwork or any other experience that requires being fully present. "You're Invited!" expresses that difficulty, and presents visual descriptions of that experience, which may, or may not, provide new ways to think about how culture is currently consumed._ This paper web encompasses text and imagery that has been generated by MAM over its many years of presenting art to the public. The actual paper used to create this web has derived from excess materials previously in storage at the museum, as well as repurposed art history books and exhibition catalogues. Kate Dodd has utilized invitations for openings, education, and fundraising materials, the snippets of which proclaim, "You're Invited," "Join Us!" and "Support MAM." Also featured are iconic, cut paper images based on works from the museum's collection by Philip Guston, Robert Henri, Lily Martin Spencer, George Inness, and others, as well as an Indigenous Chilkat blanket. Tom Nussbaum's outdoor sculpture _Listen_ (2008) is also represented. These elements, combined with commentary from past curatorial essays, are juxtaposed with patterns derived from combining cut up exhibition announcements, producing a playful but probing and intuitive approach to openwork collage that attests to the inspiration of crazy quilts. This wave of visual information is both a celebration of, and an investigation into, the museum's role in the presentation of art in our society. Dodd sees this as "an opportunity to highlight the museum's history, iconography, and generosity to the community in combination with the evolving meaning of this information over time." The names of artists, donors, curators, exhibitions and acquisitions are interwoven throughout, as is the Museum's logo. She is fascinated with "what it takes for a museum to sustain its programming—it's a monumental lift."