Sonoma Community Center
Enriching lives through education and the arts — for Sonoma Valley and beyond
Events
Filtering the Feast – Kate Rusek Ceramics Resident Exhibition
November 23 @ 9:00 am – December 22 @ 4:00 pm
Filtering
the Feast
Kate Rusek
SHOW DATES: November 23 – December 22
OPENING RECEPTION: November 23
TIME: 6PM-8PM, Artist Talk; 6:30PM
LOCATION; Gallery 212
276 E Napa Street
Sonoma, CA 95476
Kate Rusek has been examining the waste and discard landscape through sculpture and installation for over a decade. For Filtering the Feast, Rusek will probe the shifting complexities of metabolized emotion, waste transformation, and our relationship with nature through new wall based and freestanding sculpture. These works, rendered in the artist most saturated palette to date, mark an exciting evolution of subject and material an Rusek’s practice. The ostentatious grandeur of our stunning world becomes more acute in Rusek’s signature maximalist ornamentation. The artist invites us into a practice of intimate looking to more keenly notice the planet and our communities as grounds for flourishing. The already gorgeous world becomes even more beautiful the closer one looks.
Working across porcelain and stoneware, metal, and waste textiles, New York based Kate Rusek creates objects and scenes that draw from the aesthetics of the natural world and critique a backdrop of capitalist production and consumption. Her work is characterized by an acutely detailed visual language that translates disposable plastics ephemera from the healthcare sphere with forms found inspired by marine organisms into seductive yet often unsettling surrogates for human emotions and social anxieties. Informed by her experience as a bespoke garment worker, Rusek’s sculptures integrate highly tuned hand wrought ornamentation– using beauty, disgust, and sensuality to evoke a psychological response. Yet, in Rusek’s hands these symbols are recontextualized, shifting from objects of consumption to agents of critical reflection. Rusek combines these details with geometric forms that both reference the human body and reflect microscopic organic architectures connecting forces of planetary reproduction. Her totemic objects reference regeneration and growth, the horror of consumptive striving, and teaming ecosystems that form the base of life supporting food chains. Her current body of work stands as a pillar to address the high-tech, low-biodiversity dystopia that is creeping across the planet.
About the Artist
Kate Rusek
Kate Rusek is a multi-disciplinary artist assembling highly tactile sculptures, textile, and installation with an emphasis on Craft and materiality. Her work transmutes wasting and waste matter into abundant, maximalist forms with dynamic biophilic textures that interrogate perceived value and a rigid binary of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. Her research and writing examines the connective edges and dissonant intersections between systems thinking and the natural world. Rusek received dual B.F.As from The University of Miami and an M.A from Savannah College of Art and Design. Rusek has been awarded residencies at The Archie Bray Foundation, Socrates Sculpture Park, Chulitna Lodge, The Hambidge Center, Red Lodge Ceramics Center, and Vermont Studio Center among others. She is the Devra Freelander Fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park for 2023, the recipient of a Windgate Distinguished Fellowship for Innovation in Craft.
She is a Daytime Emmy winner for her costume design on Sesame Street. She has built a career as a bespoke fine Tailor, builder of couture and specialty costumes, and design/builder of puppets and puppet garments as a member of IASTE Local 764. Among other highlights she has been on staff at Saturday Night Live since 2016 and contributed her expertise to the broader film, television, and theater industry in New York City for the last 15 years. This work informs a portion of the artist’s approach to tactile research, devotional craftsmanship, and sculptural materiality in her practice.
Select exhibition venues include Shelter Gallery (NYC), Material for the Arts (NYC), Trotter and Scholer (NYC), Culture Object (NYC), Ki Smith Gallery (NYC), Socrates Sculpture Park (NYC), Mizuma, Kips, and Wada (NYC), Geheim Gallery (Bellingham, WA), The Vestibule (Seattle), Koulva Sullivan (Spokane, WA), The Archie Bray Foundation (Helena, MT) and the Gallery of Visual Arts at The University of Montana. In 2025 she will present a solo exhibition at Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester, VT. Rusek currently splits her time between New York City and the Washington Coast.
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