Kate Gilbert interview
10 August 2012
This time, Frau Kolb was almost on time. It was, 11:30 am when she got to the intended location. The appointment was for 11:OO AM. Kate Gilbert was gracious, waving Frau, UP!, with a long, slender, and articulate hand poking between the black bars of third floor window on the Spanish Colonial building. Frau exhaled and marched up, tripod in tow. Downstairs, her car was legally parked. In a perfect spot, next to a paid meter in front of a beautiful Mexican street-art virgin, her resplendent robes in rose red and yellow gold, a beneficent smile, lifting Frau up, throbbing with cosmic power, emitting good-vibes across Korea-Town, Los Angeles; the virgin’s palms pressed together in prayer, a Mother VAGINA blessing. Beyond a shadow of doubt, Frau knew she had arrived, at the precisely RIGHT spot.
Inside, a sun-drenched front room, Frau quickly set up with Gilbert’s insight on light, from past training as a photographer, guiding the outcome. The women talked briefly before turning the camera and letting a conversation ensue focused on Kate Gilbert’s miraculous performance art during June 2012’s Perform Chinatown, an event which has since burned itself in Frau Kolb’s brain and prompted this excursion into another vibrant yet mysterious ART territory.
The woman, the artist, that emerges is as deep and complex as the infinite sea of possibility, which is the universe. Gilbert is simply brilliant. Her personal charm is nuclear. She is one of the most attractive humans, EVER! Yet, she is entirely free of the weight that such responsibility might lay upon her transcendent grace. The ease with which she floats from one idea, a concept, a thought to the next is rapid to the point of dragging a novice swimmer in thought to his or her death, IF not alert. Yes… She is menacing. A woman so intelligent, versed in art, steeped and stewed in it, during her childhood, under a disco ball in sub-sub-urban Pennsylvania, near a barn, her father a professional potter and an accomplished visual artist, her mother an independent store owner, must be treated with respect. No?
Respect. Respect. RESPECT! Gilbert’s work demands it. She is fearless in her discipline to evoke the absurd and dance without depending on vertical acrobatics or other traditional pyrotechnics to achieve meaning. HER WORK is pared down to the bone, the essence of performance. The artist that works in time, whose dance is evaporating before the eyes of the audience, works with blood and bone in the most elemental sense. During her perform Chinatown performance Gilbert wore only HOT PINK heals. She needed no other prop to address the universe. These heels she called her "Donna Summer," shoes; one goddess evoking another. Gilbert created a blazing drawing etched in the minds of everyone that saw her perform, mostly faced down, plastered on the the cement, except for that stunning moment when she was looking up at the sky, forever.
© Frau Kolb 2012tripod