Kathleen Beausoleil lives and works in Fair Haven, NJ. Primarily working in oil paint, her works focus on what it means to be a social being. Beausoleil received a 2022 Fellowship from the NJ Council of the Arts; was a member of The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program and has been an Artist in Residence at programs including the Cuttyhunk Artist Residency (twice), Chalk Hill Artist Residency, Da Vinci Art Alliance and the Artist *Forests* Community Program sponsored by the Holter Museum of Art and Helena National Forest. She recently had her first solo show at the Monmouth Museum and is 2023-2024 finalist for the Center for Emerging Visual Arts Fellowship. Beausoleil’s work is in the permanent collection of The Art Museum of Missoula and numerous private collections. She has also taught at the SUNY Empire State’s Studio Semester program. She received her BFA Cum Laude at Syracuse University.
Kathleen Beusoleil’s paintings and drawings explore the complex relationship between human behavior and the natural world. How people behave in public is very telling about the culture and environment they live in. Observing these groups can help give us a better understanding of our place in our culture.
Our individual expressions appear acceptable, distasteful, or somewhere inbetween within the context of a larger community of organized and accepted social norms. It is with this premise that observations for the subject are made with the realization that people need other people, their own people, to be happy, accepted, and fulfilled. I believe we also need other people to project our grievances and, at times, rally around a common enemy. It is a sense of belonging that people seek both in our microcosmic home lives and within our macrocosmic social lives.
Collective behavior is everywhere in nature from ant colonies, to trail formations and tree structures. Groups and networks reflect the stability and demands of their environment, playing out the push and pull between the driving force of the whole being greater than the sum against the role of an individual's actions.
We consider ourselves as having conspicuously unique personalities. Yet, if one takes a closer look, it is clear that there exists a pack mentality programmed into our social interaction, and territorial behavior. There is a sense of liberty in anonymity; a safety in getting lost in the crowd; or, lost in the woods
These drawings explore human social interaction and territorial drivers of crowd behavior. At their core, they examine how people organize. It is usually the spaces between people that define their relationships.
The medium of these drawings is ink on paper.
