Katelyn St. John

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courtesy Tandem Press

The "Dream House" exhibit by Katelyn St. John.

media release: Dream House

Exhibition Dates: March 28 – April 15, 2022. Reception: Friday, April 1, 5-8pm (Coinciding with a performance in our Friday Jazz Series from 5-7pm. Click for information)

Tandem Press is pleased to host Dream House, a Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition by Katelyn St. John, University of Wisconsin-Madison MFA candidate and current Tandem Press project assistant. St. John’s work depicts her exploration of abandoned architecture. This exhibition features prints that delve into the visual representation of the space between experience and memory.

Artist Biography: Katelyn St. John is a multimedia artist who works in printmaking, photography, and sculptural installation. She explores and photographs abandoned architecture that she then transforms into prints and sculptures which convey her experience of the space to her viewers. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking and Art History from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 2015, she researched green printmaking materials at Zeamays Printmaking, and in 2019 she was among the first recipients of the Tandem Press Gabriele S. Haberland Travel award. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she works as a Project Assistant for Tandem Press.

Exhibition Statement: 

Dreams are composed of experiences and memories, strung together to create a familiar but often flawed line of events. They come in vignettes of darkened or obscured images, of atmosphere and introspection, in color and black and white.

Dream House is an exhibition that brings together my experiences exploring abandoned architecture and my memories of those places—each a fragmented dream of the space. Each object and image presents a visual representation of the space that lies between experience and memory.

To begin this work, I photographed abandoned structures and their environments. Then, I pulled shapes of negative space out of my photographs and transposed them onto other spaces to focus on a specific aspect—the structure of a home, spray paint on a wall, or a play of light. By fragmenting the images of these spaces, the resulting representation conveys the reality of how one’s experience of a space is often obstructed in some way.

The prints and objects included in this exhibition are the results of my fixation and extended rumination on broken buildings. Through fragmentation, I have focused on aspects of the buildings to comment on the gaps that form within our dreams, experiences, and memories. 

This exhibition is made possible through support from the Anonymous Fund.