Kathryn Geismar
Kathryn Geismar is an artist and psychologist whose work explores the complex, transitional nature of identity. She is the recipient of two Mass Cultural Council Visual Art Fellowship Grants, residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Foundation House, and numerous awards. Her work has been featured in the New Talent/New England show at the St. Botolph Club in Boston, the Danforth Museum in Framingham, Mass., the Bristol Art Museum in Rhode Island, and was featured in Studio Visit magazine. She is a member of The Crit Lab, The Yellow Chair Salon and Pell Lucy Artists.
Over the past four years I have been drawing and painting my oldest child who is transgender. It has felt like an intimate conversation, at once vulnerable and guarded. As a cis-gender woman, my desire has been to see my child free from the distortion of my own expectations as well as the cultural expectations that impact us both. In portrait drawings on translucent mylar sheets, I have overlaid our images, exploring the boundaries between self and other, male and female, mother and child. I think of these translucent mylar layers as skins that both obscure and reveal aspects of an evolving self.
Most recently, I have been struck by how quickly an idea of “self” can shift and change. I have been playing with these themes by creating groups of paintings with only partially visible portraits that seem to be peering into a reflective pool or mirror, at once appearing and disappearing from the scene.
The steady drumbeat of the work is the idea of flux. In the overlaid drawings, figures move in and out of focus; layers of mylar promote looking through. In the paintings, a moment captured is a moment of potential change. The figures come and go in relationship to one another forming crystallized moments of being that appear to be shifting before the viewer’s eyes.