Art Opening: Such Lonely Country by Katy McCarthy

Join in for the opening of Katy McCarthy’s exhibit in our historic McDermott Learning Center. Refreshments will be served and the artist will be available for questions.

During her time in Austin, McCarthy has been closely reading the diaries of early 20th century botanist Mary Sophie Young, who explored and collected plant specimens around Texas. Young’s eloquent passages about getting lost, loneliness, and the vast landscape of Texas mirror McCarthy’s experience. Based on her research, McCarthy has created a new video work that merges Young’s diaries with McCarthy’s own writing in a meditation on solitude and health. Several other sculptures, embedded with videos, build off of these ideas with forms and narratives related to human procreation, productivity and plant life.

Katy McCarthy was born in California and lives in Austin and Brooklyn. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at Cluster Gallery; Sleep Center Gallery, New York; Flux Factory, LIC; Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Tiger Strike Asteroid, Los Angeles; Maxon Mills; and the Military Museum in Belgrade. Her videos have screened at NURTUREart’s 2018 Single Channel: Video Art Festival, CUNY Video Festival, and Queens Boulevard Film Festival. She has been an artist-in-residence at SOHO20 Residency Lab; Grin City, Iowa; The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY and currently, the St. Elmo Arts Residency at the University of Texas at Austin. 

The St. Elmo Arts Residency is a joint project of the Department of Art and Art History and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin that offers one fellowship each academic year to a newly minted MFA artist in painting, drawing, print, photo, sculpture or multimedia.