June 15 – August 3, 2024
Kolman & Reeb Gallery is pleased to present its next Project Space Grant Exhibition, Foreign Bodies, by Kate Casanova. Kate, a multimedia sculptor, takes on glass blowing as a new medium to explore recurring themes of bodies and their environments.
Hanging daringly over the gallery or displayed on custom-made tables and shelves, Kate’s exhibition explores bodies and the foreign materials, such as clothing and skin piercings, that inhabit them. With a focus on organic shapes, Kate combines glass pieces with various metals, silicone, and bioplastic. She wants viewers to see her sculptures as strange yet somehow familiar.
Initially attracted to the fluidity and translucency of glass, Kate saw blown glass as the perfect medium to further explore recurring themes of bodily transformation and change. By incorporating glass with disparate materials that push and pull against each other, for example, a glass bubble blown into a copper net, which constrains and distorts the original glass shape, the sculptures imply that humans are biological entities that form, and are formed by, the material world.
“Kate says receiving the Kolman & Reeb Gallery Project Space Grant was instrumental in the resources she needed for this experimentation with glass blowing,” says Anita Sue Kolman, Kolman & Reeb Gallery co-founder and co-partner. “Kate mentioned how working with glass is an expensive process and has a steep learning curve. Jodi and I are thrilled that the grant enabled Kate to take glass classes, buy materials, and rent time in the hot shop.”
Jodi Reeb, gallery curator, and co-partner, comments, “Having followed Kate’s work for years, and given the organic and fluid possibilities, glass was a natural progression for her to explore. These pieces, especially her use of knitted copper wire to constrain the glass, speak to her content in such a direct way.”
Kate is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the posthuman through sculpture and video. Exhibited nationally and internationally, Kate’s past venues include the Black Cube Nomadic Museum (Denver), the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), and Doug Aitken’s Station to Station, an exhibition that traveled by train from New York to California. Kate is represented by Yi Gallery (Brooklyn) and Myta Sayo Gallery (Toronto). She received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota in 2013 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2008. She serves as Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Denver.
