The idea of a collection of cells which group together is continued in the work Something Out Of Nothing, an installation of stacked wood placed on the wooden slatted floor of Katya Gardea’s studio. Many pieces/lengths of wood are in raw or relatively untreated states that present us with the ‘skin’, nakedness and origin of the working material. 
Gardea’s studio functions as a volumetric support to these stacked formations, sharing for an instant a poetic direction with the wooden floor lengths that run horizontally (or crossways) from the initial entrance into the room of this installation, a key to the dynamic of this work. The shared poetics with the existing floor slats finish as ‘counter’ pieces come in to the mix with horizontals, verticals and pieces propped against the wall. However, we are not lured into individual hermetic connections, rather Katya Gardea’s installation invites us to share the floor and join the ‘shoal’ 5 of “things” 6 or ‘stacks’. The stacked verticals and horizontals that break up the momentum somehow work in unifying these simple sculptural volumes to a point where we can embrace the rudimentary essentials, something that inescapably connects this work to many of the thoughts and inner working of Imi Knoebel, in the development of a nonobjective language where the realms of painting and sculpture join together with architecture.  Lynne Cooke mentions these “rudimentary essentials” in her excellent introduction to the long-term view installation in the Dia: Beacon of Imi Knoebel’s celebrated Raum 19 (room 19):
“these ineluctably nonobjective forms elide the realm of painting with those of sculpture and architecture. But not only does Raum 19 dispense with illusion in favor of corporeal presence, it also restricts metaphoric and referential content. … it arrays the constituents and components of a painterly practice reduced to its rudimentary essentials: form, material, surface, space, support. Given its embrace of both the plastic and the tectonic, Raum 19 may also serve as an ideal model for a creative revisioning of the world, but Knoebel's works never create a metastructure of reality: "[They] take part in this world as things," Christoph Schenker argues. Moreover, in seeking to function as "instruments of the pure experience of 'image,' excluded from the realm of language," they remain, he contends, "at the very limits of communicability." 7
An enthralling parallel can be made between these different works and in the proximity to “Color Of Skin” and in how a corporeal presence begins to unify the works. There are many questions that Something Out Of Nothing asks of us now, that were also central questions to Knoebel’s relation to his mentor Joseph Beuys, most especially in relation to the regenerative function of creativity: Where do these “things” come from? What are they? Questions of functionality, creativity, territory and spatiomaterial ideals? How Katya Gardea contributes to these questions is evidenced in her ability to use a pragmatic study of formal properties as a sociopolitical tool in bringing gender to bear in defining a corporeal presence. This is also apparent with the inclusion of T Jay Crossing. Within this connection Something Out Of Nothing does present itself as a topographic territory dispensing with allusion and concentrating instead on the geography of place, of Katya Gardea’s studio. T Jay Crossing gives us a territory that is defined through the identity of a female migrant crossing a frontier. The closer we get the more the image becomes unfocused and the greater the potency of gender, blurring against the horizon.

Structure Paintings and Sound Installation (Cuencos y Perros)

The Structure Paintings have clear connections in their material to Something Out of Nothing but are formatted to work on the wall, horizontally. Each panel has a central motif working at the center. Katya Gardea speaks of Barnett Newman and his “Zip” series, where he used a vertical band of light (he called this band a “zip” ) to symbolize creation. For Barnett Newman the zip was an image that destroys the void:
  “the chaos before creation…/ the moment of creation and possibly a moment of arrival for art” 8
Accompanying the Structure Paintings is a sound installation (Cuencos y Perros) created from the sound given by quartz cuencos (‘singing’ bowls), a composition dedicated to exploring a sculptural volume between painting planes, sound and matter. The cuencos are carved out of solid blocks of quartz crystal, an act of taking away volume and matter to create a sound vibration.  The Structure Paintings employ a similar dialogue with natural material to create volumetric planes and dialogues. The confrontation of a central vertical (“zip”) is echoed in the sound of dogs barking. A sound that seemingly breaks the continuity of the cuenco but also allows the textured sound of the quartz to resonate against something in a dialogue of paradoxes.

Simon Levy
London, March 2011

1 Following conversation with Katya Gardea B.
2  Wise Geek http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-major-organs-of-the-body-and-what-are-their-functions.htm
3 Hito Steyerl “In defense of the poor image” http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94
4 From BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/factfiles/skin/skin.shtml
5 ‘Shoal’ …Here I would like to make a poetic reference to a Damien Hirst work titled “Fishes swimming in the same direction for the purpose of understanding” where Hirst places hermetically sealed glass boxes of fish on the wall all in the same orientation from fin to head with the impression that they are connected in facing the same way.
6 Christoph Schenker   See footnote 7
7 Lynne Cooke http://www.diabeacon.org/exhibitions/introduction/87  Imi Knoebel ‘Raum 19’
8 Tate Collection. Tate website: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=17287