Seeing into the Shadows
Cate McQuaid
The Boston Globe
October 20, 2010
You need light to see your shadow, and Katina Huston uses several lights to cast shadows of everyday objects such as glasses, bicycles and horns. She suspends them from her studio ceiling, then traces their shadows on the floor in ink. Huston’s show at Chase Young Gallery is most enthralling when she is least literal, when her shadows smear and blurt and bubble, and that seems to happen most in her brass section.
“Trumpet Shadow 2” is nearly vaporous, with two dark moons at the horns’ mouths surrounded by looping hardware in pale sepia. At times, the ink explodes out of the form like steam. Or like music. In “Blast 2,” several trombones jutt across the unframed Mylar surface. Some are dark, some are just pale impressions. Huston evokes the sense of light on polished brass while at the same time creating something much less tangible, a single organism of tangled lines and fluid luscious shading.
In some of Huston’s bicycle-wheel drawings, the wheels pirouette on the one point, or move in an orderly way across the page. But her most striking wheels, such as those in “Kitchen Fire (Hand of God)” collide. Six duke it out on the right, spokes wildly crossing, hubs at aggressive angles to one another. Two more fly off into space as if breaking from the melee. All fall off the edges of the picture ramping up the feeling of motion and fracture.