Most of Kate McQuillen’s 13 watercolors, wall installations, and silk screens at Caro d’Offay are “translations” of e-mails, letters, and voice mails she’s received. McQuillen used a different method for each translation and reveals neither the encoding system nor the original message, creating a sense of hidden meaning that causes the viewer to reflect on the mysteries of language. The watercolors’ pale, sensuous colors and elegant geometrical designs are especially appealing.
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McQuillen’s dad is a painter, and she made cartoons and comics about her family as a child. She began college at NYU as an English major in 1996 but transferred after a year to the Massachusetts College of Art. There she was struck by how an e-mail has no physical form; she contrasted “all these e-mails sitting on some server” to her boyfriend’s letters, which she’d saved in a shoe box. Reading about computers, she was fascinated by the ways they translate data into bits and by their dependence on “language,” or stored commands. She began making drawings and prints that were kind of technical looking, she says: “There was imagery of lots of little particles.” She made her first translation piece in 2001, charting the letters of the alphabet in an e-mail on a rising and falling line. During a school trip to China a month later, she found she loved the different styles of calligraphy at the Shanghai Museum. “They took words and gave them a physical form, but the mark making was so careful, so expressive, and the calligraphy had wonderful rhythms. It reminded me of an Egyptian exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston I saw as a kid. They re-created a tomb, so you were surrounded on all four sides by stone walls covered with hieroglyphics. These words that someone wrote 4,000 years ago were still conveying an idea. I realized a word’s physical form could be as meaningful as its dictionary definition.” She also admired the premodern art of China because it has “nothing to do with who the artist is as a person. They just want it to be a good painting–it’s often a copy of an old master.”
