Past
The Fourth Wall gallery is pleased to re-open our doors for In Between, a solo exhibition of paintings by Bay Area artist Cate Nelson. These oil on linen paintings, many done during the pandemic, have a remarkable physicality which draws the viewer to their surfaces. Cate studied film as an undergraduate and worked in the Los Angeles film industry before leaving to focus on painting. Her current painting practice intersects with this background in film, which aligns it with a postmodern tradition. While modernist thought held a belief that language and art must be treated separately, postmodern theory pushed against this with “a blatant disregard for aesthetic categories… words are often treated as purely visual phenomena, while visual images are offered as script to be deciphered.”1 Cate Nelson's paintings offer us a script to decipher. They relate to one another much like jump cuts in film, where the viewer assembles the meaning. In her work, the meaning resides between the works as much as within them.
Cate Nelson lives and works in Oakland, California. She received her MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and her BA from Bard College in New York. Nelson has exhibited in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Recent awards include an Alternative Exposure grant from So-Ex in San Francisco and Affiliate Artist residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work has been collected both in the US and abroad. In addition, Nelson has been involved in several community art projects in the Bay Area, including co-directing a monthly artist lecture series.