Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.
STATEMENT OF WORK
Influenced by man-made environmental catastrophes, emotional landscapes, and ecological systems, Kate Rusek assemble highly tactile sculptures transmuting these themes into lavish maximalism. Using large quantities of collected and constructed objects, these composite forms and dynamic biophilic textures interrogate socially constructed value and material narrative. Engaging with history laden excesses, Rusek shape scenes that examine the binary between the living and manufactured worlds with an emphasis on a somatic experience of Craft. Through a lens of deep time, particular interest is placed on synthetic and highly manufactured elements as an action to transform anthropogenic ruin into an counter-economic act of rebellion. Her work is a method to posit a regenerative future and pose questions about psychological perception, socially constructed value, and a broader care ethic through a lens of desire and abundance.
Composed of highly textured surfaces and miniature biophilic vessels, Rusek’s ceramic forms capture absence as a tangible object to touch and feel. Objects from the artist’s personal life like paper that assigns cultural value such as medical and tax documents augment unique clay bodies. Autobiographical textiles are integrated within the clay to form compartments and voids that emulate organic architectures. Small molded components are cast from fertility medication packaging to create tactile surfaces ripe for abundant ornamentation, teaming with life akin to marine microfauna. Rooted in Post Natural Studies, these clay objects emerge from complex processes, where the manufactured relents to fluid chaos, possessing an alluring strangeness that emerges when the body recognizes connection to our planet’s life sustaining forces . Rusek’s sculptures are receptacles of material histories, calcifying memory, and imagined futures of self as if these were a symbiotic ecosystem element; small parts essential to assemble a larger whole and discover abundant fodder for transformation in the creative process.