Kate Wilson

“When one leaves the crowds of the city and begins a cold drive one is struck by things encountered simply because the landscape is empty of urban clutter, Kate Wilson is struck by the splendid and the obscure in landscapes where desolation and derelict structures are pebbled with marks made and never erased. She notices the grandness of the sky and the tight weaving of the natural world with the industrial and technological. She evokes a commentary on the advance of civilization or on the odd remnants of quirky lives. Behind all of her works is the suggestion of open eyes behind the dashboard.”

- Corinna Ghaznavi, independent curator
Excerpt from Cold Drive, published by YYZ Artists’ Outlet
vol. 2, issue 9, February 2003.

"Kate Wilson inflects her work with a disquieting luminosity. One writer has likened the energetic demeanor of Wilson's paintings to James Dean-ish recklessness while her style has an ungainly elegance as they tilt toward a subtle terror"

- Helen Marzolf, curator, force majeure, Kenderdine Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon

"Wilson draws (and paints) very well indeed. Her dystopian cities and mouldering malls (some lit by chandeliers hung from the sky above as if they were frozen explosions) are made to creak and lean and crumble with a few deft rubbings of ink. Her coloured drawings - sour with acidic lemon and lime green and reds the colour of melting steel - make you feel as if you are watching the apocalypse through coloured gels"

- Gary Michael Dault, Gallery Going, The Globe and Mail

"The lovely irony of the work is that Wilson has a singing, airy stroke that if applied to, say, pictures of sunny hills and red barns would convince observers that life was one big beautiful bundle of happiness. Applied to what looks like amor-plated plants or to blackly sarcastic riffs on signs ("We're sorry already") reads a funeral display, it makes culture seem a wholesale ruin"

- Richard Huntington, The Buffalo News

"Billboards, drive-ins and landscapes are among the touchstones of the exhibition Cold Drive by Toronto painter Kate Wilson, whose excursion is a place where the innocent meets the ominous"

- Canadian Art Magazine, winter 2002