KATE GROOBEY

Kate Groobey’s painting, video, and performance work reflects on what it means to be a strong, queer, woman in the world today against a backdrop of rising homophobia across the globe, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in America, the Woman-Life-Freedom movement in Iran, and environmental disaster. Driven by the ideals of equality and solidarity, Groobey is building a lexicon of motifs that envelop, strengthen, and empower her two protagonists, Jina Khayyer, her writer wife, and the Female Stallion, Groobey’s own equine avatar, who are poured, spooned, and dripped onto canvases to create visceral, sculptural impasto surfaces. Articulating a queer, female gaze, Groobey’s painted heroines don’t sit quietly on walls. They jump out of the frame, they speak, and they move in video-works wherein Groobey becomes her own characters, bringing them to life with painted costume, dance, digital editing tricks like Boomerang, taken from social media, and a soundtrack in which Groobey and Khayyer’s intimate daily conversations become mantras of strength and empowerment: their desires, philosophy, poetry and directives fill your mind as you look. Groobey's masked performances are something akin to traditional Japanese Nõ theatre, where actor and audience are encouraged to become one with a character in order to practice their skills of empathy, reflecting Groobey's belief that practicing empathy towards others is essential for a healthy society.