Katie Torn

Artist Katie Torn uses special effects from film, video games, and advertising to create hyperreal fairytale spaces. Through her art, she explores the effects of American consumer culture on our lives. Cubism inspired, she combines traditional artistic techniques with new technologies to create haunting images that reflect on our consumer culture as well as the way we interact technology. Her work is both a meditation on the material world, as well as a reflection of our modern, digital world.

Originally from the Midwest, Torn has exhibited nationally and internationally. She has had solo and joint exhibitions at the South Bend Museum of Art and the School of the Arts. Her work has been displayed in the United Kingdom and Brazil, as well as Israel. She has also exhibited at PS1 MoMA and bitforms gallery in New York. Torn has been a Visions Fellow at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, in addition to participating on group exhibitions. She has also served as an artist-in-residence at the LMCC Process Space on Governors Island, New York, and the Institute of Electronic Arts in Alfred, New York.

Her process of creating her art is unique. She blends digital construction and reality in such a way that the viewer will be unable to distinguish between the two. In her most recent installation, “Calm Before the Storm,” a blond woman’s head is suspended in the air above a cluster of skyscrapers. The installation’s top is topped off by a blond woman whose head bobs from a series of hot pink hydraulic pumps. The blond figure sits on top of a sand dunes, at the edge of an aluminum-foil ocean. A memory junkyard, Michelangelo’s David, as well as a fecundity in life are some other works of art that were displayed.