Kathy Grove
[citation needed] From 1966 to 1970, Grove studied painting, printmaking and photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and its Honors program in Rome, Italy.
She then re-photographed these, printed multiples of the images photo-lithographically, and used them to create subsequent generations of new paper and plastic wall reliefs that were large 3 dimensional abstract photomontage works.
She continued to create topographic wall reliefs of paper, photo montage materials, Masonite, and aluminum painted with acrylic and encaustic, slowly introducing silhouettes of recognizable images.
[citation needed] Working at Oya DeMerli’s SiteOne Digital Studio, Grove collaborated in 1994 with the COLORS magazine graphic designer Tibor Kalman to create "Reagan With Aids," a protest poster, and "What If…", racial-facial makeovers in which celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Jackson, the Pope, Spike Lee and others had their races changed.
Janson’s History of Art pages about Masaccio, with retouched reproductions of the paintings tipped in by Grove, was reproduced in an April 1990 issue of Artforum as a special artist’s project.
Tired from the pioneering years of her work neither being readily accepted as a new development in orthodox "photography" nor a variant form of "appropriation art," Grove has increasingly heeded Marcel Duchamp’s admonition that the avant-garde artist’s only true recourse was to "go underground.
Her work has been discussed in select journals, such as Lawrence Weschler’s Omnivore,[8] or in art history or theory courses taught by photo or feminist scholars such as Anna Chave, of the CUNY Graduate Center and Joanna Isaak of Fordham University.
In addition to the ongoing Other Series, in recent years Grove has undertaken other known groups of work addressing the themes of imperfection, evanescence/transience, absence, loss, and mortality.
In her OutTakes series, Grove made cryptic abstract photo compositions entirely from the detail images of wrinkles, pimples, and other skin imperfections she removed from her digital fashion and beauty retouching projects.
She overlays black and white views of archetypical family activities from the turn of the 20th c., a now by-gone age, with small, nearly incoherent bit-streamed fragments, shards, and pixelizations of contemporary life.
As if viewed through the lenses of memory, some details resonate in crystal-clear sharp focus, while others remain forever out of reach, shrouded in a resolute, but enigmatic fog, riveting viewer attention while denying perceptual closure.
