Kate Teale’s site-specific installation in Smack Mellon’s back gallery departs from the specificity of historic architecture in and around its local Dumbo neighborhood, including Smack Mellon’s own interior. Dumbo, once an industrial hub, still retains many of its built features from over a century ago in various states between disrepair and new refurbishment. The ornate concrete and brick structures impose as well as protect, highlighting persistent tensions and durations between human bodies and the spaces constructed to hold them. Using intense tonal greyscales of graphite and charcoal on Tyvek, Teale visually excises these architectural details and transports them onto the walls of the gallery.
To the left of the gallery’s entrance, floating windows sink and grow from shadows to create a perfectly distorted perspective. To the right, geometric thresholds open onto water, visually collapsing the distance between the gallery space and the East River directly behind, and repurposing the walls as the gateway. Lastly, in an installation covering the back wall, Teale both reflects and continues the columns holding up the building’s now defunct coal trough–located in the adjacent gallery–which at one time served the crucial function of providing heat and energy to the neighborhood.
In Teale’s visual universe, minor architectural moments provide shelter and respite from the outdoors. Buildings are porous and vulnerable to time, weather, and human destruction. Teale’s focus on windows and columns reveal these elements for their functions: as portals and infrastructure. As portals, the windows act as transitions between states–light and dark, inside and outside, water and concrete, and thus, as a bridge, provide visual comfort in knowing that there is another side. The columns physically, and enduringly, uphold the building’s structure, stabilizing the space despite the concrete’s slow entropy over the past century and a half. In this universe, darkness can be generative, concrete can be soft, and time can expand while looping back onto itself.
Through permutations of physical boundaries, light, and fragility, Teale considers the intrinsic connections between humanity and the built environment. Her drawings are both reflections and ghosts of the neighborhood, pushing familiar vistas to the edge of abstraction. Her works command a sustained attention, due in part to her accumulation methods–layering and removing material from the Tyvek’s surface. In orienting viewers in relation to light, she asks at which point do the frameworks that sustain our environments begin to vanish.
Kate Teale is a British born artist living and working in Brooklyn. Her work spans painting, drawing, and installation. She received NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowships in Drawing (2023) and in Painting (2008), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation artist development grant (2018). Teale has shown with Studio10 Gallery, and her work can be seen in Pierogi Gallery’s flat files. Recent exhibitions in DUMBO include “Window Window” at Main Windows (2025), “Hole” at Undercurrent (2022), and “Blurr” at Platform (2022). She has written feature articles for the UK art magazine Contemporary Art, and has curated exhibitions at Platform Project Space, and the Kerr Gallery, Western Michigan University, and as founder/director of Big&Small/Casual Gallery. Kate has a studio in DUMBO, as part of the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program. Her IG is @katetealestudio and her website is www.kateteale.com
Image: Installation view, Kate Teale, “Vanishing Points.” Image courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo by Etienne Frossard.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Lincoln Restler, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with generous support from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Wolf Kahn Foundation, Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, and the Buckholz/Fountaine Fund.
In-kind donations and services are provided by Team, Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education, Sage and Coombe Architects, Royal Talens Foundation, Blick Art Materials, Artist & Craftsman Supply, Wegmans, Costco, and Trader Joe’s.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
