05/29/2026
Come join us this Saturday ie tomorrow for the opening of Kate Petley’s ‘Penumbra’ at the gallery from 4 to 7pm. Parking here are Bergamot Station Art Center is easy and free. If you like this works from the images you are going to love them in person. We look forward to seeing you and Kate will be present.
Kate Petley’s practice turns light into structure, and structure into image. Working across sculpture, photography, and painting, Petley builds compositions that are at once materially precise and visually unstable, where the line between object, document, and illusion is elegantly undone.
Petley’s process begins with temporary sculptural arrangements of painted materials, staged in intensely lit environments and photographed at the moment of their brief, atmospheric existence. The resulting photographs are then translated onto canvas, where the image is reanimated through selective painted passages that are often nearly imperceptible. The effect is a surface that remains insistently flat even as it evokes a shimmering, holographic depth.
Kate Petley received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2025 and has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1988. Her work is represented in the collections of the City of Houston, Grinnell College Museum of Art, the Polsinelli Collection, the Howard Hughes Corporation, and others. She has exhibited at MCA Denver, FotoFest Houston, PhotoIreland, and the CU Art Museum, and has received a Ucross Foundation Fellowship and a NEA/Rockefeller Foundation grant. Petley lives and works in Peekskill, New York.
