Kate Gilmore

I was presently surprised by this lecture! Looking into her work prior to her lecture there was nothing that really sparked my interest. However, my opinion quickly changed after getting the opportunity to see her talk individually about each peice. Gilmore's work has a great appeal just by her careful choice of colors and arrangement. During her lecture she made it very clear that she was perhaps overly aware of her want to have colors that represent a sense of time, place and emotion- her awareness of this really separates her overall style from other video artists that I've seen. Not only is she documenting her ideas but she is doing so in a clever/aesthetically pleasing way.
I could also really appreciate the way Gilmore incorperated shape into her concepts. The repetition of hearts and stars in most of her videos really drew a lot of her work together and also made a very recognizable signature for her work. I think overall repetition is working in Kate's favor. Her videos aren't extremely long but they are long enough as to where they start becoming repetitious- but they grow at the same time. At the lecture it was mentioned by one in the audience that they began to feel for her character in each video- I felt the same way. I think because of the growth (maybe even climaxes?) the audience really begins to feel sympathetic towards the characters. Particularly in "With Open Arms" where Kate portrayed a girl looking for stardom but was being pelted with tomatos. At first, it was just a girl being pelted by tomatos but toward the end she was completely covered with tomato goo & seed but she still persisted in her goal of stardom.
However, I have to say personally the videos I was most attracted to were "cakewalk" & "wallflower." After making that decision, I kind of realize I might like them mostly because they were the peices that were the easiest to figure out, or understand. Most of her videos are straight forward, but with these two and the added pain/work/concept/aesthetic put into them, they really stood out. Overall, I think Kate's work is pretty amazing- & I'm very interested to see how her Texas show will turn out.