In Between
solo presentation
The Fourth Wall Gallery
Oakland, CA
2020

Press Release

The Fourth Wall gallery is pleased to present In Between, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Bay Area artist Cate Nelson. These oil on linen paintings, many done during the pandemic, have a remarkable physical presence. They are primarily about surface but simultaneously intersect with Nelson's history in time-based media. She studied film as an undergraduate and worked in the Los Angeles film industry before leaving to focus on painting. This background continues to influence her painting practice, which seems to align it with a postmodern tradition. While modernist thought held a belief that language and art must be treated separately, postmodern theory pushed against this with “a blatant disregard for aesthetic categories… words are often treated as purely visual phenomena, while visual images are offered as script to be deciphered.” (click for footnote) Cate Nelson's paintings offer us a script to decipher. They relate to one another much like jump cuts in film, where the viewer assembles the meaning. In her work, the meaning resides between the works as much as within them. -Marlene Angeja of Fourth Wall Gallery

 “There exists a space in between then and now, between this and that, and between my relationships to places, objects, memories, and myself in an increasingly mediated and, at times, alienating existence.” -Cate