We Belong Untethered
a solo exhibition by Kate Hoffman
October 24 - November 8, 2026
Opening Reception on Saturday, October 24th from 5-9pm.
Artist Gallery Talk, Sunday, November 8th from 1-2pm.
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.
At the heart of We Belong Untethered is an animated film of historical fiction centered on two real historical figures: Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, orator and escaped slave, and Benny, the free Black sailor who loaned Douglass his Sailor's Protection Papers. The documents that allowed Douglass to pass as a free sailor and escape bondage in the South. Their meeting is precisely such a kairotic moment: two people navigating an imperfect and unjust world, whose brief intersection made freedom possible. Neither chronos nor kairos precedes the other here because it is the collision between the crushing weight of historical time and the fragile, luminous possibility of a single human encounter that gives the work its power. This same interplay reverberates throughout the exhibition in a striking parallel mythology: in Hoffman's fictional universe, whales hunted in the whaling industry are reincarnated as passenger planes. Like the great whales of the 19th century that were hunted for oil that fueled the engines of industrial capitalism, modern aircraft trace routes dictated by the same vast, impersonal forces of chronos: global trade, fossil fuel economies, and human hubris. Both whales and planes move along their respective currents; the hunted whales along their migratory patterns, forever changing the human trajectory of global movement and planes moving along corridors carved by capital and power. And yet, even within this system of constraint, kairotic moments persist such as brief, charged instants of crossing, of proximity, of lives and trajectories that momentarily share the same sky or sea.
The exhibition draws from several interconnected bodies of work within Hoffman's ongoing Golden Age of Whaling series, including Inversion, Reunion in the Arctic, A Myth of Reincarnation — an Inverted Space, and Once There Were Whales Here. Running through all of these works is a gesture of witness and mourning evocative of the ancient tradition of placing stones on a tombstone, which is a practice of remembrance in which the act of visiting a grave and laying a stone bridges the world of the living and the world of those who have passed. Like the meeting of Benny and Frederick, like the reincarnated whale tracing its flight path above the ocean, this gesture is both chronotic and kairotic at once: it is embedded in the long history of loss and longing, and it is also a singular, unrepeatable act of presence, a moment in which the living pause, bear witness, and refuse to let the dead be forgotten."
- Exhibition text by Dr. Eun Jung Park
"We are not severed from the past but live amongst its wake. By reimagining worlds now lost, can we also envision a consciously connected future? Shall we take a leap out of the trappings of chronologic time to embrace the kairotic, and allow for it to lead us on a path towards a more harmonious future?" - Kate Hoffman
About the Artist
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.