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Katie Hector

AmericanAmerican
, b. 1992

My portraits of friends, people I’ve met, and complete strangers are allegories for longing, intimacy, and grief in response to isolation and dissociation. Layering bleach and dye on canvas I build-up up and erase sections to create composite likenesses. Painting with bleach and dye instead of, let’s say acrylic or traditional mediums, allows me to have a direct conversation with the canvas itself. Within each painting, I am testing the limits of the fibers and the canvas’s ability to retain or let go of pigment. Thus the memory of the surface produces the final after image; an impression of personhood, an uncanny portrait.