Color her world - Kathryn Refi at iMOCA, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art

Kathryn Refi 

Records, iMOCA - Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis, IN

Indianapolis Star, March 5, 2010

By Mary Lee Pappas / Star correspondent

March 5, 2010 Indianapolis Star

"Day 3" by Kathryn Refi

Each stripe represents colors Kathryn Refi saw during a day. The seven pieces are on display at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, which drew a crowd on opening night. -- Photo provided by the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art

A series of seven large-scale, striped, minimalist paintings by Kathryn Refi grapple with the concept of time in her show at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art.

Each autobiographical painting represents a day in a week of her life, even though the concept took a year to complete.

"I started thinking what are the colors I see in my normal day, just going about my routine," Refi said of the body of work titled "Color Recordings." "What's the predominant color in my life? And how might that affect me? I couldn't answer that second part, but I figured I'd try to answer the first, so I videotaped everything I saw for an entire week.

"All of my work involves using some sort of control or scientific method to investigate aspects of everyday routine and daily life."

The artist, from Athens, Ga., had a spy camera inconspicuously mounted to a baseball cap she wore, and a computer programmer aided in determining the predominant and relative amounts of colors she saw.

Each painting is 100 inches long.

"I knew I was going to be working in percentages, so if I saw a certain color 1 percent of all my waking time, then I knew that band would be an inch wide," Refi said. "I determined that the smallest line that I would paint, just out of feasibility, would be one-eighth inch wide. So, I had to see a certain color one-eighth of an inch in terms of percentages."

Although obsessive about recording and measuring color luminance, then analytically generating color swatches and gruelingly mixing oil paints to exactly mirror them, the order of the colors is completely subjective.

Rainbow-like spectrums of stringent vertical color bars resembling TV multi-burst test patterns were the result.

She never intentionally interacted with any colors to enhance her results.

Ultimately, color winds up being an antagonist as well.

Refi's goal with the work was to put concept over result.

"I can control the order of the colors, but beyond that, I couldn't control them, so luckily they're OK, but they could've been very different," she said.

"I kind of create the perimeters for it . . . but I don't know what it's going to look like. And so I kind of set myself up to do these paintings. And I was like, 'I hope they're not ugly.' "

And they aren't.

Refi's time distortions are soothing, provoking contemplations about how we spend our time.

Sharing the same exhibition space are her other two body of works: "All Things Considered" -- drawings created from listening to National Public Radio-- and "My Address Book" -- portraits of important locations in her life.

Unlike "Color Recordings," they show time chronologically (right to left or morning to evening,) succinctly and rather literally.

"Color Recordings" melds factual data into an abstract color harmony that aesthetically stands alone outside of its rigid concept.

'Records'

» What: Works by artist Kathryn Refi. » When: Through March 20. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. » Where: Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA), 1043 Virginia Ave., Suite 5. The museum is in the Murphy Art Center. » Cost: Free. For more information, call (317) 634-6622 or visit www.indymoca.org.

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