Kate Turner

work in progress

12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now

This collection was part of Southwest Contemporary’s annual 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now group show.

The experience of frequent moves and re-location have become an important element in Turner’s work. She examines notions of “hometown,” bringing together the uncanny remnants of a fractured narrative into fusion. Her installation provides a backdrop of aesthetic comfort as the guest can explore perceptive shifts, expand consciousness, or simply relax in a place of contemplation. In her exhibition “Somewhere That’s Green” at the Roswell Museum, Turner utilized the power of story and how “in between” spaces can be the most fruitful in providing growth. The Midwest United States is used as a cultural form inverted to see what strange oddities tumble out. Viewers are invited to walk through a twirling display of an upside-down landscape of Turner’s Ohio corn stalks. Listen to the stalks as they whisper her secrets and tell her coming-of-age stories about finding identity as an adopted child. “How many similar stories come from all the hometowns she has been in?” she wonders.

WHEN I WAS KNEE HIGH

“Knee high past the Fourth of July” is an old adage farmers used to measure the growth of their crop. If the corn was at knees length by Independence Day then you were on track.

I remember one Forth of July our neighbors in the suburbs put on and incredibly dazzling and illegal display of fireworks. We all watched from our squares of green that stretched for blocks. As I was watching the fireworks ash came down and fell into my eye. It burned and scared me so much I swore that day that I would hate fireworks for the rest of my life.

With all the technological and agricultural advances the saying does not apply to the crop anymore. Corn now should be way past the knee by Independence Day.

It was only when I left the Midwest, and the golden blanket of protection the corn provides us there, that I was able to feel what Ohio had imprinted on me. Like an animal with its natural abilities to navigate home, I felt its pull to come back. After all I had just fallen in love with a man under some fireworks, and maybe that wasn’t all bad.

I am cultivating my own corn fields. For the ones that beckon me also call me a n***er and have hate in their core. I am measuring my own growth. Because the people there still use old sayings form measurements and I need something bigger than that to measure all that I got. I am protecting my stories so that when they are fertile and ready I can give them away to feed and comfort like a good midwestern woman should. And you all are welcome to the feast. Well, at least those who like corn.

ANTIESTABLISHED is a multidisciplinary collective of artists whose interests lie on an intersection between art, noise, fashion design, popular culture and politics. Through our collaborative efforts and imaginations we are working to generate loving visions of the future, by perpetrating moments of visceral liberation in the present. ANTIESTABLISHED includes Warren Jones, Kate Tuner, Mariana Parisca, and Sandy Williams IV.

UNARMED was originally designed as garments to protect against the suspicion of having a firearm. When worn in public or as performance, the high visibility colors and clear vinyl fabrics offer a luminous transparency aimed at subverting certain gazes or stigmas, at the cost of personal privacy. The work started as performative gallery objects, became streetwear, and the harsh realities of our well-armed world quickly drove us to consider the possibilities of the virtual landscapes, and the conceptual framing of science fiction as well. We are trying to imagine what an UNARMED world could look like. The fluid body of this growing collaboration currently extends as a clothing brand, static art installations, a practice of public performance, and virtual reality renderings and animations. Unarmed is an ongoing collaboration with Sandy Williams, Warren Jones, and Mariana Parisca.

Residuals of a shattered athletic identity catch up on me. The emotional carnage brought on by the dizzying pull of my heart when pondering the not so neutral memories of being an athlete leave me to question what kind of social, moral, and physical impact sports had on me.

Invisible labor. Caretaking. Money. Value. Two films play in a random room. Each film played on a different monitor alternating from domestic house work and care taking, to camming, a form of sex work. In the cam sessions I am seen building the room the films are being viewed in inside the installation space. Artificial flowers adorn the walls and smell of floral Febreeze. A mimicry of life and beauty. A little bit of performance to stay alive. After all, we need to eat, after all the Tooth Fairy needs to come and after all black women been making a dollar out of 50 cents for a long time now.

In this performance, I stood in front of an audience and opened my original birth certificate for the first time. I was adopted at birth and was not given access to this certificate that had my birth mothers information on it. Ohio had released original birth certificates of adopted people in 2016. I found information on this paper that filled so many holes in my imagination. I found questioned answered in a second I had longed to know. And after this performance I found my birth mother.

Pain is beauty, beauty is pain.

A couch hangs upside down on a wall and slowly seeps hair oil on to a white marble floor. I am 10 and my neighbor is telling me not to sit on their new couch because my hair oils will ruin it. I was young but the memory still shoots stinging tentacular bolts of hot emotion to my face. I am 10 and uncomfortable and in this installation, the viewer is there with me. My memories often come to me in nightmare-like visions or fantastical dreams. I use these surreal illusions to create work that opens up space for dialog around identity.

"Not Your Forbidden Fruit" 

This piece was inspired by Suheir Hammed's "Not Your Erotic, Not Your Exotic" poem. In the poem Hammed talks about the fetishization of women of color in our culture. Her words urge women of color to counter how we are seen as rare and exotic even though there are plenty of women that look like us in the world. I relate to this poem so much because I grew up in a predominantly white area where because of my skin I was seen as something "new" or fetishized by the men in my life. So many time I would hear "I have never been with a black girl" or "you are the prettiest black girl I have ever seen." I used to embrace these micro aggressions as positives and they made me feel special. This piece is about me realizing what I am not, and that I shouldn't let someone use my body as their tantalizing idea of a fun time. I see this piece later becoming a performance piece.