Flowering Animals opens at Hecho a Mano on May 1, and the show is a continuation of preoccupations that go deeper than any single exhibition. Big powerful cats, houses with secrets, red cougars holding their ground. In her most recent conversation on the podcast, Kat talked through the questions her work has been quietly asking for years.
She kept circling back to the primacy of process over product. "The golden stuff is just what gets stirred up and brought up," she says. "Being engaged in the process is so much more important than the product. The product serves other people, but for me it's always in the process." She doesn't know exactly what a piece is doing while she's in it, has Aha moments down the road, watches her relationship to the same painting shift over years. The work emerges from "my whole life, everything that's happened to me, everything I've seen and experienced in my body."
That openness runs through Flowering Animals, which began organically after her second residency in Oaxaca. The colorful vitality of the city, its reciprocity and craftsmanship, gave her something she wanted to bring back into the paintings. The more tough stuff she finds in life, she says, the more she leans into kindness and care and reciprocity. "Joy in fact is a radical act of resistance and perseverance," she writes in her statement, and the show is, in its quiet way, a working out of that proposition.
The animals in her paintings sit at the edge of cuteness and brutality. "I've been thinking about cuteness and sweetness a lot more lately, like needing that coziness as the world feels like it's on fire." She describes painting a baby fox and a prairie dog as two sweet friends on a hard day, then realizing with a kind of horror and amusement, "this is like a grandma painting. Oh no, I'm doing grandma art." She tries to make the animals scary sometimes and can't quite get them as scary as she wants. What comes out instead is harmony, peace, the predator-prey dynamic held in a kind of dreamlike suspension. The animals function as protectors, guides, and witnesses, "kind of in the middle plane," she says, where wisdom and vulnerability sit in the same frame.
The houses that recur in the new work carry a similar doubleness. Kat is drawn to the coziness and nurturing of homes while also painting scenes where a snake emerges from under a door, where a cougar blocks the entryway, where the symbolism of shelter is shadowed by what might be hidden inside it. "I love the mystery of that," she says, and the influence of cinema runs throughout, scenes constructed like film stills caught mid-plot.
Connection is the thread tying it all together. Kat describes herself as quiet, introvert and extrovert at once, and yet deeply oriented toward people. "I love feeling kind of like a host, creating spaces where connection happens. I just want to be a connector." Art, in her view, is the medium, but the impulse beneath it is the desire to connect. "We're all doing that," she says, "and it takes a lot of work."
It's that desire, finally, that Flowering Animals is offering up. "I think the most profound way to heal is to feel seen," she says. Her animals look back at the viewer, the houses keep their secrets, and the paintings hold a tender, alchemical attention that asks us to notice ourselves noticing.