NURSES, ROSES, MIDNIGHT
Catherine Fairbanks
November 13, 2021 - January 15, 2022
About the Exhibition
A chimney is metabolic. It is used to heat others in a home or to heat a shared structure. It is the heat containing form and the active center of architecture. In my 2016 exhibition, Two Chimneys, I separated the chimney from its traditional surrounding structure of a house or a cabin, and in that solitary appearance I suggested that a chimney can be seen as an independent entity.
In Nurses, Roses, Midnight, this part of architecture now emanates from the human form. The chimney appears in the bodies of nurses, representing a shared and social metabolism, present even when the nurses are at rest. In conflict with the overt visibility of the chimney as a worker’s metabolism, the total work of these individuals is often not fully understood outside of those in the practice. It is this invisibility that surrounds labor, that I have designated under the word midnight; approximated by the world, its truth remains hidden.
-Catherine Fairbanks, 2021
About the Artist
Catherine Fairbanks is an artist and a nurse in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and has since attended national and international residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the National Textile Institute in Iceland, where in 2014 she produced her solo exhibition Empathomimesis, and in 2017 the Wool Factory in Barcelona. In the spring of 2020 she was a visiting artist in the Ceramics department at Long Beach City College additionally she premiered Chimney Dances, a four-site collaborative work with Dylan Crossman, formerly of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden UCLA. She has received critical acclaim in Artforum, der Freitag, Carla, and Artillery.