Echo resounds presents new paintings by Kate McQuillen that are inspired by contemporary translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts by Emily Wilson and Stephanie McCarter. The paintings draw on episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses—including Echo and Narcissus, Daphne and Apollo, and Salmacis and Hermaphrodite—as well as Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. These myths feature female characters who prevail over their foes, assume half-male, half-female forms, and speak loudly. The figures and stories become points of departure for the paintings to consider women’s speech and transformation, particularly during episodes of escape and displays of power. Rather than treating myth as a fixed narrative, McQuillen is interested in its variations and in how speech is echoed, revised, and carried across time.

Rooted in abstraction and the history of female presence and its representation, Echo Resounds considers how the artist’s sources of inspiration, which also include Greek decorated pottery, Roman marble sculpture, and ancient texts, have been translated over the centuries—where stories, images, and voices reverberate through repetition, transformation, and time.

McQuillen’s new paintings illustrate these ideas into a contemporary visual language built through rhythm, movement, and accumulation by using repeated abstract strokes across super-flat surfaces. The exhibition marks a shift in McQuillen's practice toward a more direct type of mark-making. She employs lifted and erased marks, and a structure which is always slightly broken, to create compositions filled with motion. The imagery in the works evoke sound waves, radio signals, and the transmission of speech; all modes of communication. At the core of McQuillen’s work, she is interested in how people communicate through stories, technology, and language.

The show includes a community-based component, “Meet Me at the Met,” a series of informal small-group conversations in the Greek and Roman galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In these meetups, the artist creates an opportunity for discussion while looking at a selection of Greek decorated pottery, bronzes, and Roman marble sculpture that have influenced the works in the show. She uses these objects as starting points for conversations about speech, fame, and women's voices in antiquity, and as a means to facilitate discussions about problems that existed in antiquity and which still affect us today. The project has deliberately been created without the use of social media, in the spirit of understanding the value of in-person conversation and the power of word of mouth. An accompanying limited-edition, hand-printed ‘zine, made in an edition of 80, is freely distributed to participants.