On October 6, 2017 artist Katie Waugh presented her show Reiterations at the Bret Llewellyn Gallery in the Engineering Technology Building on SUNY Alfred State College campus. In creating the pieces for this show, Katie used a Mamiya RV 67 camera with custom backing. She used medium format film and created 3D printed masks to insert within the camera’s dark slide slot. This allowed her to use the negative space created by said masks to composite images within the camera itself. A good deal of this show was shot at Cayuga Lake. One goal of her work is to reframe from the traditional rectangle frame. Also, since Katie is adverse to viewing something only once, her work is shot using multiple angles and exposures.
Katie’s interest in structural collapse as a system is what led her to develop a new framework to use when creating her imagery. Many of the images depicted had an element of water or a sunset. By choosing these as a subject matter, Katie is breaking down the images to determine why people are attracted to these visuals. She relates this to the idea of the “romantic sublime,” which is the idea that these visuals create the strongest emotional response in an individual viewing them (Katie related this to the sensation of the vastness of the sky and water in comparison to the individual feeling small). In addition to examining the structurally unsound, Katie is interested in easily broken systems and the haphazard fixes that are applied to them. Questions that Katie asks herself often while working are as followed: “What are the assumptions of photographic representation? How much can I get out of a single image?” Overall, the construction of Katie’s pieces are carefully considered and meticulously planned before execution. Katie said this about her work: “the image is in charge.”
Jasmine Marie Angelo 