Kathleen Ritter

practice explores questions of visibility, especially in relation to systems of power, language, and technology. Working across the mediums of video, sound, and print, her work investigates relationships between politics and aesthetics, specific histories and contemporary experience, the space of the museum and the street. Her recent research has investigated different modes of encoded communication, camouflage, and subterfuge in the context of early 20th century military technologies, women’s suffrage, and avant-garde movements in culture. From this research, she has been excavating notable patterns and auditory cues, film footage, and writing systems a century old, and examining places where they overlap.

Mining the intersecting histories of military technology, feminism, and the cultural avant-garde, she is interested in patterns that appear to overlap between very different fields. For example, the bold, asymmetrical patterns in Cubist painting were so similar to those found in dazzle camouflage that Picasso famously claimed to have invented it himself. During this time of immense political unrest and sweeping change, anxiety about shifting societal roles and the growing emancipation of women was registered – aesthetically – on the surfaces od things: on fabric patterns, on the printed page, on painted canvas. Ritter’s work during her residency will be to create a series of silkscreen prints based on these intersecting histories; prints that function as artworks as well as templates for fabric patterns.