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Grant Wahlquist Gallery is thrilled to announce Kate Greene’s second solo exhibition at 
the gallery, “Black Sun.” The show will run from June 2 through July 8, 2023. The
gallery will host a reception with the artist on Friday, June 2nd, from 5 – 8 pm.

Taking its title from philosopher Julia Kristeva’s treatise of the same name, “Black Sun”
represents a stunning evolution in Greene’s consideration of the relationship between
vision, knowledge, and authority from a feminist perspective. The works presented
marry theoretical sophistication—the artist’s reflections on Susan Lepselter’s writing on
uncanny resonance and the American landscape and Jeff Wall and Kaja Silverman’s
studies on liquidity and wetness in photography in particular—with technical prowess,
resulting in images that are both sublime and foreboding. Simultaneously intensifying
strategies present in Greene’s first solo exhibition at the gallery while expanding their
thematic and historical references, “Black Sun” explores the connections between
beauty, mourning, and survival from an incisive point of view and with singular style.
“Black Sun” includes examples of three interrelated bodies of work, including new
photographs in Greene’s series “Site Unseen.” Contemplations of landscape as locus
for competing myths and invisible histories, these new works predominantly begin with
infrared digital captures of Freetown-Fall River State Forest in Massachusetts, which
sits on Wampanoag land. Often described as “the most haunted forest in the United
States,” the area is replete with centuries of overlapping narratives and themes:
European colonization and the displacement of native peoples; the American
Revolution; the manufacture of weapons for the American Civil War; true crime stories
and their intersection with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s; environmental
degradation and recuperation; cryptozoology; UFOs; and more.

Greene transforms these initial infrared captures through a process of making prints,
physically manipulating the prints in water, and re-photographing the manipulated prints
until they develop a topography that intersects with that of the initial photograph of the
forest. This process evokes both the wetness of darkroom printing as well as occult
practices—many of the photographs are manipulated in water taken from the forest
itself, establishing them, in a way, as relics. The resulting works, ravishing and
abundantly black, are haunting in every sense of the word.

These photographs are presented alongside infrared digital captures of the sea taken at
Grand Isle, presented without the re-photographic manipulation described above in
elegantly subtle silver tones. The only inhabited barrier island on the Louisiana Coast,
Grand Isle has been repeatedly battered by hurricanes and now is threatened by rapidly
rising seas as a result of the climate crisis. It is also the site of the death of the
protagonist of Kate Chopin’s 1899 feminist masterpiece “The Awakening,” who
concludes the novel by wandering into the sea. Where the Freetown-Fall River State
Forest is almost overflowing with history, Greene adopts Grand Isle as a concentrated site for articulating the intersection of environmentalism and feminism—that is, the
ecofeminist notion of the connection between the historical domination of women and
disregard for the natural world. As in prior exhibitions, “Black Sun” also includes studio
studies that articulate the concerns of Greene’s landscapes through different forms and
gestures. Here, unpacking a symbol of feminine sadness, these studies present bell jars
surrounded by and resting on images of grasping, enveloping hands and arms.
“Black Sun” is thus an answer to Kristeva’s question: “Can the beautiful be sad? Is
beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning?” Greene answers
these questions with a resounding “yes,” further affirming that such hypersymbolic
beauty—what Kristeva called “allegory”—can be transformative. As Kristeva explains,
“Artifice, as sublime meaning[…], replaces the ephemeral. Beauty is consubstantial with
it. Like feminine finery concealing stubborn depressions, beauty emerges as the
admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live.”

Kate Greene received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BFA from
Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her solo and two-person presentations with
the gallery were reviewed and featured in the Portland Press Herald and ArtNews. Her
work has also been featured in exhibitions at venues including: the deCordova Museum
and Sculpture Park’s 2022 New England Triennial; the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Maine; the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the Rhode Island
School of Design Museum of Art; the Guatephoto Festival, Guatemala City; Museum
Dr888, Drachten, the Netherlands; Bodega Gallery, Philadelphia; Daniel Cooney
Gallery, New York; and Eighth Veil, Los Angeles. ROMAN NVMERALS published a
limited-edition book of her series Pyrotechnics in the Fall of 2016. Greene has taught
widely, including at the Rhode Island School of Design, MassArt, and the Maine College
of Art & Design. Greene currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
The gallery is located at 30 City Center, Portland, Maine. Gallery hours are Wednesday
through Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm, and by appointment. For more information, visit
http://grantwahlquist.com, call 207.245.5732, or email info@grantwahlquist.com. 

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Kate Greene: Black Sun

Grant Wahlquist Gallery

Kate Greene: Black Sun

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