For her fourth solo exhibition with R & Company, Katie Stout brings together a new body of work that builds on her irreverent approach to design while simultaneously exploring the tension between function, ornament, and form. Through a varied vocabulary of materials and motifs, Fly Trap considers the passage of time as both a conceptual framework and a force that shapes how objects are made, experienced, and understood.
Rather than approaching time as a linear or measurable progression, Stout considers its subtler manifestations: the accumulation of age, the cycles of growth and decay, and the shifting relationship between permanence and change. Clocks, mirrors, and lighting evoke its passage through movement, reflection, and illumination, while unruly brushwork and plantlike forms suggest the gradual transformations that occur as things grow, weather, and deteriorate. Together, these elements serve as points of departure, allowing time to emerge as an underlying presence across the exhibition.
With Fly Trap, Stout advances the visual language of her earlier work while reconsidering its material and conceptual concerns. The objects suggest contrasting states—growth and stillness, preservation and deterioration, attraction and entanglement—without resolving them into a singular narrative. Resisting definitive readings, they reveal new relationships through sustained observation. What emerges is a meditation on change that is neither nostalgic nor prescriptive, but attentive to the resonance that arises in the tension between permanence and transformation.
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