landforms :: lightscapes
Kit Warren
August 8 - October 5, 2024
About the Show
Featured Artist
I wasn’t an art maker until college; before that my main focus was centered around playing the viola. At UPenn, I took my first drawing class with Frank Kawasaki in Design of the Environment, and learned calligraphy in the intensive Chinese program, where I discovered the pleasure of mark making. I switched from my Chinese language major into the BFA program. It was very traditional; I learned my ABCs, painted landscapes, figures and still lifes. The process ran parallel to a type of learning I was used to from my music training. Repetition, hours of labor that allowed my mind to roam freely.
I make paintings and works on paper, wood, and canvas as a means to communicate my sense of fascination with the world around me. I’m particularly intrigued by states of order and disorder, and by our desire to reflect or understand the world through patterns, systems, and visualizations of information. The more we zoom in on, or away from, the trappings of the world and our place in the universe, the more suspicious both randomness and predictability begin to seem. My paintings, while indulging my love of color and enthusiasm for turning small, repetitive marks into large composite forms, convey feelings of wonder and curiosity that fill me as I learn more about things we know, and the many more we don’t. I turn these feelings into colorful images and careful configurations of symmetry and asymmetry, balance and imbalance, unity and dispersion.
Repeating marks create patterns drawing from a personal, abstract visual library. Landscapes, wrought iron fences, biological illustration, signage, architectural detail, Chinese characters, electron microscopy, the New York Times: all these and more find their way into the cryptography of the work. As I make more and more repeated marks, autonomous patterns form, to which I can then respond. The smaller patterns are absorbed, at times disappeared into the greater matrix. I like the process of revealing, and especially of the obscuring.
— Kit Warren
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