Visual Arts Katina Huston
Andrew Engelson
Seattle Weekly
March 23-29 2005
Susan Rothenberg has her horses, Morris Graves has his birds, and Katina Huston has her bicycles. The Bay Area artist, philosophy professor*, and former bike messenger has made bicycles her talisman, and idee fixe that she repeats in large, near abstract washes of ink on Mylar. Using 20 different types of ink in a painstaking process (each layer must dry completely before another is started), Huston’s totemic bikes are a dim memory- a picture of a shadow of a fleeting glance. The tangle of gears and pedals and tires and derailleurs all add up to a lush vision of a machine that’s a perfect and simple extension of the human body. Like some sort of holy relic, the works confer saintliness and a bit of immortality, to her subject. And that’s completely appropriate, since it’s the bike riders (and I’ll admit I’m one of the fanatics) who will save us all from global warming. Bryan Ohno Gallery.
* artist’s note: at the time I was teaching Greek Thought, a great books courses at St Mary’s College of California which the journalist renamed ‘philosophy professor.’