TELL ME YOU LOVE ME

About the Exhibition

Tell me you love me.

Smile when you say it.

Keep telling me.

[video transcript of serial killer Paul Bernardo addressing a teenage girl]

I haven’t watched Bernardo’s video--the material isn’t easy to access. It hardly matters, though. I’ve read the books (both true crime and literary reimaginings), listened to the podcasts, and watched the film. There’s no dedicated TV special yet but approximations of his narrative are everywhere. Close by are beheading videos, body bags, a visual inventory of bodily destruction.

We sit in an uncomfortable position as spectators caught between opposing forces, fervently consuming actual and simulated violence via Netflix and YouTube. Tell Me You Love Me locates us within this socio-cultural frenzy. The show could be titled Something Something Dead Girl; perhaps nothing would be more compelling.

The works on display speak to each other using the language of biopolitics, a Foucaultian dialog whose parts of speech are brute force and the visual appeal of our fragile bodies. They delve into a subcutaneous world of inner distraction, where carnality doesn’t quite mask a penchant for violence. Abstracted to distended pixels and high school poetry, they squat there, perfectly at home, waiting to seen.

About the Artist

Kate Hampel holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal. Based in Chicago, she has participated in residencies across the United States, including the Vermont Studio Center, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and the Ragdale Foundation, and was the recipient of the Fountainhead Fellowship in Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and has been shown nationally and internationally at galleries and museums including AIR Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, the Daegu Culture and Arts Center in South Korea, the Michigan Institute for Contemporary Art and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.

 Kate Hampel’s work examines the aesthetics of violence, from the individual to the institutional. Her current projects draw material from true crime stories and geopolitical power struggles, with their attendant implications for the gendered or othered body. Text work and installation speaks through the voice of an unreliable narrator, implicating the viewer in the making of meaning.