{"id":4127,"date":"2017-02-21T01:37:35","date_gmt":"2017-02-21T01:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secretacres.com\/?page_id=4127"},"modified":"2023-02-23T16:13:22","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T16:13:22","slug":"keren-katz","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/secretacres.com\/?page_id=4127","title":{"rendered":"Keren Katz"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nBIO
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Keren Katz<\/span> (seen here in a photo by Neta Alonim), Keren Katz is an Israeli-born cartoonist, writer, and the non-fictitious half of The Katz Sisters Duo. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts’s MFA Illustration Program. She is the author of the Academic Hour<\/i> (Secret Acres), nominated for the SPX Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. Her work has been published in anthologies by Smoke Signal, Locust Moon, Rough House, Ink Brick, Retrofit Comics, The Brooklyn Rail, Carrier Pigeon, Seven Stories Press and NOW. Katz is the current Center for Cartoon Studies fellow, and recipient of the SVA Alumni Society 2013 Micro-Grant, the Sequential Artists Workshop’s 2014 Micro Grant, the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art’s 2015 Silver Medal and Award of Excellence, the 2018 Slate Book Review and the Center for Cartoon Studies sixth annual Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic (The Academic Hour<\/i>) and the Cartoon Crossroad Columbus Emerging Talent Prize.<\/p>\n

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\nIN PRAISE OF KEREN KATZ<\/span><\/p>\n

Keren Katz\u2019s<\/span> comics transcend the medium, the text is poetry, the drawings are dance, the stories are not like anyone else, she is a true original.<\/p>\n

– Richard McGuire, author of Here<\/span><\/p>\n

Rivi coexists at school with a roommate who hosts an internet show in which she washes dishes. A student and fan of the show, Yakov, also appears in the tale, along with Rivi\u2019s father, but despite their presences, the book is most a personal meditation on memory, childhood, and possibilities\u2026 \u2026Katz\u2019s figures sometimes show Modigliani-esque exaggerations of standard body proportions, and she makes exceptional use of patterns and color to create two-dimensional textures. People, animals, and buildings are warped, twisted, or \u201ctransmuted\u201d in order to strike at deeper emotional truths, and they\u2019re always fascinating to just gaze at. The Backstage of a Dishwashing Webshow<\/em> may require multiple readings if one is to fully grasp the the beauty and mysterious power of Katz\u2019s work, but it\u2019s time well invested.<\/p>\n

– Foreword<\/span><\/p>\n

The dreamlike narrative is illustrated with colorful, flowing full-page drawings of elegant and elongated human figures in ballooning clothes, always in motion and mixed with birds, architecture, and abstract shapes and patterns, all creating the sense of an unstable, crazy quiltlike reality. With minimal text, Katz\u2019s art loosely recalls highly stylized Art Noveau illustrators like Aubrey Beardsley or Harry Clarke crossed with a jumbled surrealist sensibility.<\/p>\n

– Publishers Weekly<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout the Backstage of a Dishwashing Webshow<\/em>, there are running visual motifs, like chickens as props. They express action and emotion but have nothing to do with the actual narrative. It’s a repeating motif that’s the absurd essence of this fundamentally absurd book. Meaning not only constantly shifts, but it’s also possible that meaning itself is a trick. It’s a prop, it’s a script, it’s the behind-the-scenes footage of the illusion. It’s a desperate attempt to create meaning through movement and repetition, to flatten form and form a map of what’s possible to understand about the world. Even as identities shift and change and people disappear, the goal is to keep dancing. In the end, Katz, through the Backstage of a Dishwashing Webshow<\/em>, tells us that we must keep our heads down and keep moving in the face of these metaphysically shifting sands in order to create our own patterns in the world.<\/p>\n

– Your Chicken Enemy<\/span><\/p>\n

Her books are choreographies, says the artist from Tel Aviv. “Until the age of 19, I danced ballet. All my pictures are of me as I dance. And after every picture I look and develop the movement further.” This movement is always a little different, as in everyday life. “Every night I dance in front of an audience, it’s a little different,” Katz says. As in Milan Kundera’s novel, Immortality<\/em>, in which the protagonist, also a novelist, develops an entire novel out of the beckoning of an older woman, Keren Katz is also inspired by seemingly banal movements and postures, she says. “Once my brother broke his finger and got two screws to fix the fracture. On the same day my dog died. He wanted to lift my dog up again, but could only do it with his arms. I have dedicated a whole book to this gesture.”<\/p>\n

– Weser Kurier<\/span><\/p>\n

MORE PRAISE FOR KEREN KATZ<\/span><\/a>\n