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The continuum of cute
Bali
Hawaii
Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California lives and works in Brooklyn, New York although she grew up spending part of each year in Finland. Her works exist in a wide range of media including photography, sculpture, video and audio. Her work has been exhibited in places like PS1/MoMA, Serpentine Gallery in London, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, Artists Space and the Sculpture Center in New York, and The Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
In 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Finland organized an exhibition of her works realized in Finland and the Tang Museum of Saratoga Springs, New York presented a 10-year retrospective of her work and published a monograph called “All Forms of Attraction”. The New Museum in New York commissioned a new web-based project as part of their inaugural exhibition in 2008.
Katchadourian´s projects are often characterized by a deliberate attempt to scrutinize, examine, organize, reorganize, translate and mistranslate, often with a focus on the human relationship to the natural world.
At Galeria Llucià Homs Katchadourian will exhibit the Moss Maps series, photographs of a type of lichen commonly seen on granite rocks in Finland that often resemble geographic forms that the artist identifies in each picture. The photographs become an accidental atlas that speaks to our impulse to recognize, name and categorize. Since some of the landforms are very familiar and others are not, evaluating the accuracy of each shape becomes like a geography test. The Continuum of Cute is a work consisting of 100 different animals, all images found on the Internet, arranged in order from “least cute” on the left to “most cute” on the right. “Cute” is a typically American term that roughly translates to the Spanish word “mono.” The piece the project investigates both our individual and collective sense of the "cute" at the same time as it indulges the anthropomorphic qualities that are often embedded in our sense of the word. The third project in the show, “Head of Spain,” is a meticulous dissection of a paper road map of the country, where all the land has been discarded and only a delicate network of roads remain. Inspired by the Greek geographer Strabonis´s description of the shape of the country as “la piel de toro,” the dissected map has been shaped into the head of a bull.