Artist Gallery Talk: November 8th
Keystone Gallery is pleased to present We Belong Untethered, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Kate Hoffman, on view from October 24th through November 8st, 2026.
The culmination of over a decade of rigorous research, the exhibition brings together works rooted in chronotopic Magical Realism, weaving together the overlapping histories of 19th-century whaling, US slavery, and their profound resonance with contemporary questions of globalization and climate change.
Working across multiple media, including digital drawings, mixed-media collages, paintings, and animated film, Hoffman holds two conceptions of time in tension throughout the exhibition, not as a sequence, but as a permanent condition of human experience. Chronos, the long, relentless current of historical time, the arc of empire, extraction, and ecological consequence, flows through every work. And yet it is perpetually interrupted by kairos: the ruptures of moments, when lives briefly intersect and history quietly pivots on its axis.
Kate M.S. Hoffman is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose practice spans digital drawing, mixed-media collage, painting, site-specific installation, and animated film. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego, an M.A. Ed. from Alliant International University, and a BFA in Fibers from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Hoffman has completed residencies at The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Kasini House's Art Meets History Initiative and Kolaj Institute, the Banff Centre in Canada, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine, and Est-Nord-Est in Quebec, Canada. She has exhibited widely since 2007, with a recent 2026 solo exhibition of We Belong Untethered at the Southwestern College Gallery in Chula Vista, CA. Her 2012 solo exhibition, Black Gold-Liquid Gold, the Golden Age of Whaling project, described by the artist as "whaling meets the Underground Railroad" at the Greenleaf Gallery at Whittier College, CA and the ATA Gallery in San Francisco.