curated exhibition

Encounters

The artwork of Katrina Bello, Kat Larson, Gina Osterloh, and Kenneth Tam in Encounters calls into question the location of art within a precarious present.

 

Here are some further questions that we hope the show inspires: How do we encounter land, nature, and sovereignty? How do we encounter identities in flux, intersectional lives, precarious identities? How do we encounter barriers, emotional and material?  And how can we work from these encounters as entry points into thinking about what’s possible for us as we move forward during these times?

 

Walls between the Mexico and the United States; travel and immigration bans from predominately Muslim countries; and the continued deportation of undocumented individuals, to name but a few of the oppressive structural constraints inaugurated with Donald Trump’s presidency, give new meanings, for example, to Gina Osterloh’s delicate, silent dance with her shadow on a wall in Press and Outline (2014) or to the male strangers that Kenneth Tam encounters (and who encounter each other) for the first time in his video installation Breakfast in Bed (2016). The language of geography and environment in today’s political rhetoric around immigration, citizenship, and sovereignty informs the way we view Kat Larson’s series The Ghost from Vega (2016), which she shot on the Oceti Sakowin Camp at the Standing Rock Reservation. And Katrina Bello’s Rocky Rocks and Grassy Grass (2016) along with her other paintings take on added meanings, as we think about the significance of landscapes and spaces (psychic and material) in migrant travel and (re)settlement narratives.

 

This curated exhibition, we hope, captures how art encounters the precarious realities set forth by the current political and social moment and the possibilities of new interpretive strategies by its viewers.  While none of the works by Katrina Bello, Kat Larson, Gina Osterloh, and Kenneth Tam were created after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the artists’ representations take on layered meanings in this new political climate.  What rises up from the works as we encounter them during these times?

 

Curated by Jan Christian Bernabe

 

Curatorial Assistant: Mads Le

 

Contributors: Katrina Bello, Kat Larson, Gina Osterloh, and Kenneth Tam.

 

Contributors’ works are published in staggered waves from early March to early April 2017, after which the whole exhibition are archived permanently on CA+T’s website.

 

Special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation and the California Institute of Contemporary Arts for fiscal support.

 

Winter/Spring 2017

Breakfast in Bed

Kenneth Tam

2016 HD video, color, sound, 32 minutes Installation view Courtesy of the artist

contributor

X

Kenneth Tam

b. 1982

Kenneth Tam is an artist who uses sculpture and video to explore his interests, which include Abercrombie and Fitch, public restrooms, and the films of Tsai Ming-Liang. He recently had a solo show at Night Gallery in 2013, and he was a recipient of an Art Matters Grant the same year.

location

X
  • Born: New York, NY, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA

comments

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on the tracks of south dakota (the ghost prays for us)

Kat Larson

2016 Archival ink jet print on rag paper 20" x 30", edition of 3 Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Productions From The Ghost of Vega series

contributor

X

Kat Larson

b. 1979

Kat Larson is a Seattle-based cross-disciplinary artist. Her art practice includes printmaking, painting, small scale sculpture, performance and video. She is currently focusing on video and performative installations and exploring her body as a conduit for spiritual connections, specifically with her female ancestors whom she has tagged “BloodMuthas.” Outside of video and performance, she continues to work with striking found objects, clay, encaustics, and organic materials such as dead bees and dirt.

Photograph by Lindsay Borden.

My name is Kat Larson, and I am bi-racial woman practicing fine art in the Pacific Northwest. My current artistic focus is exploring the intersections of new media/digital technologies and performance art. Fueling my practice are the themes of identity and spirituality and investigations of collective consciousness. At the core of my artistic expressions is a reverence for human connectivities and transformations.

I envision the art that I produce affecting positively those who come into contact with my work, as it invites people to travel into the often dark corners of human experience that people dare travel to on their own. However unknown and frightening these spaces are, my work reaches out to viewers—asking them for their trust—and assuages their anxiety through meaningful interactions with questions, ideas, and concepts that are embedded in my work. My audience can feel the strength of my feminine powers. Though sometimes very raw in form and expressiveness, my work nonetheless provokes people to ask important questions about matriarchy, ancestry, sexuality, and life and death. These are topics that connect us as individuals and as part of the many communities in which we find ourselves. When we publicly engage in this type of discourse, we not only realize our connectivity but also transformative strategies for the betterment of humanity. In short, my work initiates critical and timely conversations about community.

location

X
  • Born: Seattle, WA, USA
  • Based: Seattle, WA, USA

comments

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Rocky Quorum

Katrina Bello

2016 Oil on canvas 16" x 20" Courtesy of Katrina Bello

contributor

X

Katrina Bello

b. 1973
image description
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Katrina Bello is an artist whose paintings and drawings are about a search for analogies between the natural world and the human condition. Rocks, trees, grasses and puddles are some of the imagery that are predominant in her works. She started drawing and painting at the age of seven in her hometown of Davao City, where she was born and raised, and at age eleven started making her own charcoal medium from coconut shells and driftwood found on the black sand beach near her home. Her first drawing surfaces were rough uneven concrete perimeter walls that mark, bound and secure property lines—a residential standard in her hometown and many other cities in the Philippines. Lately she has been working with video and installation to animate this imagery and to bring into focus nature’s otherness and sameness with the human world. Her work has been exhibited in the Philippines and the United States, and she works in Quezon City, Philippines, in Las Vegas, Nevada, and in Newark and Montclair in New Jersey. Bello recently founded North Willow, where she is director and collaborator. It is an artist-run attic space in Montclair, New Jersey, and it is founded on the idea of skill-sharing between visual artists to make a happening.

My drawings, painting, installation, and videos of landscapes and natural phenomena are based on memories and close observations of things seen in my hikes in forests, beaches, deserts, salt marshes, and wildlife refuges. Weeds, fallen or dying trees, tree bark, dried leaves, swamp plants, rocks, mushrooms and spider webs, and other common things found in these natural environments become the imagery that find their way to my work. I’m interested in the idea that the most ordinary things carry extraordinary potential when translated into still and moving images, and how even the most minute and lightest forms of representing them can carry the weight of the whole thing being represented. All in all, I see the work as visual analogies of our relationship with the natural world, with references to topics about the human condition such as growth, decay, chaos and rebirth.

location

X
  • Born: Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines
  • Based: Montclair, NJ, USA
  • Also Based in: Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines

comments

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Tabletop Rockscape

Katrina Bello

2016 Charcoal and graphite on paper Dimensions variable Courtesy of Katrina Bello

contributor

X

Katrina Bello

b. 1973
image description
  • See All Works
  • facebook
  • visit website

Katrina Bello is an artist whose paintings and drawings are about a search for analogies between the natural world and the human condition. Rocks, trees, grasses and puddles are some of the imagery that are predominant in her works. She started drawing and painting at the age of seven in her hometown of Davao City, where she was born and raised, and at age eleven started making her own charcoal medium from coconut shells and driftwood found on the black sand beach near her home. Her first drawing surfaces were rough uneven concrete perimeter walls that mark, bound and secure property lines—a residential standard in her hometown and many other cities in the Philippines. Lately she has been working with video and installation to animate this imagery and to bring into focus nature’s otherness and sameness with the human world. Her work has been exhibited in the Philippines and the United States, and she works in Quezon City, Philippines, in Las Vegas, Nevada, and in Newark and Montclair in New Jersey. Bello recently founded North Willow, where she is director and collaborator. It is an artist-run attic space in Montclair, New Jersey, and it is founded on the idea of skill-sharing between visual artists to make a happening.

My drawings, painting, installation, and videos of landscapes and natural phenomena are based on memories and close observations of things seen in my hikes in forests, beaches, deserts, salt marshes, and wildlife refuges. Weeds, fallen or dying trees, tree bark, dried leaves, swamp plants, rocks, mushrooms and spider webs, and other common things found in these natural environments become the imagery that find their way to my work. I’m interested in the idea that the most ordinary things carry extraordinary potential when translated into still and moving images, and how even the most minute and lightest forms of representing them can carry the weight of the whole thing being represented. All in all, I see the work as visual analogies of our relationship with the natural world, with references to topics about the human condition such as growth, decay, chaos and rebirth.

location

X
  • Born: Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines
  • Based: Montclair, NJ, USA
  • Also Based in: Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines

comments

X

Hunks

Kenneth Tam

2010 Concrete, Abercrombie & Fitch paper shopping bags 11" × 38" × 38" Courtesy of the artist

contributor

X

Kenneth Tam

b. 1982

Kenneth Tam is an artist who uses sculpture and video to explore his interests, which include Abercrombie and Fitch, public restrooms, and the films of Tsai Ming-Liang. He recently had a solo show at Night Gallery in 2013, and he was a recipient of an Art Matters Grant the same year.

location

X
  • Born: New York, NY, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA

comments

X