Kate Bancroft & Miko Veldkamp | “Long Distance”

Press release

Long Story Short is pleased to present Long Distance, a duo exhibition of works by Kate Bancroft and Miko Veldkamp. The show falls on the 10 year anniversary of when the two first met. For nearly a decade, Bancroft and Veldkamp have shared a studio together, exploring and discussing art daily. Long Distance is a celebration of their friendship and a showcase of the body of work they have developed alongside one another. Located at 52 Henry St., New York, the show will run from January 13 to February 5, 2023.

In eight new works, Kate Bancroft explores contemporary consumer culture, politics of femininity, and nostalgia through food. Gleaming orbs of salmon roe caviar stare back at the viewer, their campy faces jostling alongside connotations of opulence, a banana split becomes a mocking smile, and pair martini glasses are joined by a pair of floating eyes. Armed with sharp wit, Bancroft indicts the social paradoxes of vanity, glamor and capital, merging high and low-brow culture in the process. A child’s greedy eyes, table level, watch mesmerized at cheeseburgers melty insides, she wants it all, judgment be damned.

Bancroft’s playful still lives are joined by Miko Veldkamp’s washy dreamscapes, through which he parses through the politics of belonging. Born in Suriname, Veldkamp grew up in the Netherlands before arriving in New York City. Through painting, he creates a fictional landscape, informed by personal history and the imprint of colonial relationships. In this series of paintings, Javanese-Surinamese ghost stories inform starting points for his paintings, through which urban exploration, displacement, trauma and narcissism are explored in sun-soaked, shaded, and moonlit vignettes. Bright flowers are paired with shaded aloes, frosted windows and patterned cloth Veldkamp's figures are always dreaming, even when their eyes are wide open. Together these works traverse long distances, between high and low cultures, between subliminal and waking states and sites of cultural belonging and displacement. Long Distance is a testament to the ways that image making can bridge otherwise impassable, metaphysical gaps.