Assembling California

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Assembling California, Assembling Self, will be the first monograph that traces my long-term personal field survey of California's ecology in this time of climate change, shifting habitats, and devastating forest fires. The monograph will also document two overlapping 2025 solo exhibitions, Assembling California at John Michael Kohler Arts Centre and Assembling Self at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. As a transdisciplinary artist, I'm interested in ecology, species interdependencies, and place. My work shows the influence of syncretic shrines and rituals, along with non-logocentric and non- Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the non-human. While I now live in the foothills of California's Sonoma Mountains, I grew up and spent 35 years in a small, rural, agrarian, South Indian town, and my studio practice draws from my upbringing in that community. I hold an MA degree in literature and translation studies, and for 17 years I trained in a 2000-year-old dance form, Bharatanatyam. Informed by this rich background in Indian dance and literature, I've come to create sculptures, installations, videos, and text, and to develop a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Assembling California began in early 2018. The title is a homage to the eponymous book by American writer John McPhee. As a new immigrant to California, deeply touched by its diverse and fragile natural environments, I found myself drawn-historically, culturally, and physiographically-to this region's topographies. Some of my research has taken place in the company of biologists and poets documenting species re-inhabiting post-fire sites in the Sierras, Yosemite, Mono Lake, Lassen Volcanic Park, and around Sonoma. Related explorations involving the integration perceptual fields around Mt. Tamalpais, the San Andreas Fault, and the Fairfield Osborne Preserve, have contributed to this ongoing body of work. The tumultuous, color-dappled sculptures relate to the fire-and-earthquake-altered landscape of my adopted home, California. I also connect them to the female nature spirits of my birth country, India. My large- scale sculptures appear to have been heaved upward from the earth, twisting, turbulent, merging sensual corporeality with tectonic drama. Here the human body and the geologically active California landscape become one thing. Those works also bring into play thread- used in India to assign sacrality to objects-and Calla Lilies, symbols of regeneration. Some of the large scale installations include collaborations with Pulitzer Prize winning writer Forrest Gander, whose poems appear as a kind of word-detritus strewn along the central rift of a fault zone created by the sculptural components. I'm inspired by philosophical thought that challenges the privileging of human existence over the non-human. I believe that at this critical moment, we need a chorus of voices-not only from scientists, but from artists and others- for our culture to adjust its disastrously short-term thinking about climate change, species mutuality, and our interdependence. I see this project as an act of mapping and remapping, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive derived from a vital contemplation of place; of re-imagining identity while articulating the symbiotic relationship between humans and place.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Radius Books
• Seitenzahl: 231
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Mai 2026
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798890180049
• Artikelnr.: 74959577

Autorenporträt

After thirty-five years in Southern India, transdisciplinary artist Ashwini Bhat now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, Bhat works in sculpture, ceramics, installation, and video, developing a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Her work shows the influence of syncretic shrines and rituals and non-logocentric and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the non-human. Bhat sees her work, in part, as an act of mapping and remapping consciousness, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive, with an emphasis on the transformative aspects of place. Bhat is a 2024 John F. Knudsen Prize winner and a 2023 United States Artists fellow. She has also received the Howard Foundation Award for Sculpture, and the McKnight Foundation Residency Fellowship. Her work is exhibited nationally & internationally and can be seen in collections at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Newport Art Museum, Kiran Nagar Museum of Art in India, Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan, FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum in China, and in many private collections. Her sculpture also has been widely reviewed and featured in BOMB Magazine, Dovetail Mag, Art and Cake, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bay Nature, PinUp Magazine, New City Mag, American Craft Council, Alta Journal, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion, and Riot Material. In 2023, Bhat became a certified Naturalist at the Osborne Preserve, a research site for Sonoma State University's Center for Environmental Inquiry.