Kate Wallace
Kate Wallace
(b. 1990, Melbourne. Lives and works in Melbourne)
Kate Wallace is an artist who uses representational painting to record and translate her experiences of place and urban living. Her works question the construction and translation of memory and the past, employing techniques including scale, cropping, blur, repetition, montage and detail. Often informed by photographs taken in transit, Wallace’s paintings serve as an intimate counterpoint to fast-paced contemporary life.
For Melbourne Now, Wallace presents three miniature oil paintings from her recent exhibition Memory of Place at LON Gallery, 2022. The original exhibition included a series of twenty portal-like paintings made over a two-year period, which the artist says ‘[reflect] upon the precariousness of remembering during times of such ecological upheaval and change’. At only 15 × 10 cm in size, each completed in 2021, the three paintings at Melbourne Now continue the artist’s exploration of scale to investigate architectures of memory and our, at times unreliable, conceptions of the past.
Wallace completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, in 2018, where she received the Wingate Student Fellowship Art Prize. A recent recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts Career Development Grant, Wallace has exhibited across Melbourne, including solo shows at LON Gallery (2022), c3 Contemporary Art Space (2019), Kings Artist-Run Initiative (2019), Alternating Current Art Space (2018, 2016) and Red Gallery (2013). In 2022, she was a resident of the New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation’s International Residency Program.