Kate Hargrave: The Journal
Elizabeth Moss Galleries, Portland, ME • elizabethmossgalleries.com • January 10–March 8, 2025
In a statement about her work on her website, Maine-based artist Kate Hargrave traces the subjects of her complex and intriguing paintings to a range of sources, from art history and children’s books to “early peer relationships, parenting and caregiving.” All of those sources are in evidence, often in a brilliant fusion, in the nine, largish oil-on-birch-panel paintings that comprise Hargrave’s first solo show.
Take The Orchard Road: the sheer number of mainly pubescent female figures—dressed, half-dressed, naked—involved in all manner of activities on a dark tree-lined thoroughfare might bring to mind Hieronymus Bosch. Hargrave creates her own garden of earthly delights yet filtered through the consciousness of a teenage girl. “With a willingness to indulge my own sensibilities,” Hargrave has explained, “I explore where memory and the subconscious reveal an adolescent realm in my work.” This statement ties her to Surrealism which, art historian Mary Ann Caws wrote recently in The Brooklyn Rail, “guarantees the constant exchange and thought that must exist between the exterior and interior worlds.”
Paintings like The Milkman’s Arrival, The Babysitter and The Penpal hark back to the dream-like scenarios in certain Leonora Carrington canvases. Hargrave is more of a storyteller: each canvas, in title and imagery, prompts diverse storylines of, in Hargrave’s words, “vulnerability and self-determination.” As your eye takes in the vignettes that unfold in humble fairytale interiors, you’re invited to wonder who the milkman, babysitter and penpal are and what their roles might be in this parallel world.
In The Fisherman’s Shadow a number of spectral apparitions interact with the figures, their wraith-like forms floating, grasping, hovering. Again, as one engages with the details in what Hargrave calls this “ambiguous territory,” one is tempted to uncover the mystery of this strange tableau, to start a “once upon a time” tale.
A 2003 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Hargrave is starting to appear on the radars of art aficionados in Maine and beyond. It’s no surprise: the paintings are remarkable in their sophistication and vision. This is a debut to remember.
— Carl Little