“It's not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary
destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human.”
-Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (282)
Vulpes Bastille is pleased to present, Place/Making a group exhibition by three recent University of Kansas MFA graduates, Tiana Nanayo Ku’uleialoha Honda, SK Reed, and Kirsten Taylor, whose exhibition explores how the artists find themselves at home. Each artist searches for deeper connections to place in an effort to feel more at home in a world in flux. Honda, Reed, and Taylor, three friends who met and made work while in Kansas, each consider place in relationship to their unique backgrounds. Together, the artists of Place/Making speak to the realities of finding a home in the twenty-first century.
Honda showcases prints utilizing photolithography and screen printing to speak to her own displacement and lost connections to her homeland of Hawai’i. These prints combine figurative elements with both endemic and naturalized plants within the Hawaiian Islands, many sourced from her father’s garden. Having left Hawai’i for graduate school in Kansas, these works connect her to her multicultural background and speak to the reality of her current place away from home.
Reed’s paintings and ceramic figures feature “Creatures” learning from more-than-human species counter-capitalist and anti-hegemonic ways of being in the world. Strange and fluid bodies navigate landscapes which are informed by Science Fiction and their local environment. Reed searches for relief from an intensely gendered human world by encouraging a wider lens which sees themselves in relationship to a larger non-human kin.
Sculptures by Taylor, combine a variety of mediums such as fiber, ceramic, and wood. These mixed media sculptures explore our connection to place and nature by engaging them as teachers. Made in part with foraged materials, the artist considers our entanglement with the more-than-human world through her creative research.
While each artist is on a unique journey of finding themselves at home, their shared time in Kansas has created friendships and undoubtedly inspired connections between their work. These connections and inspirations have made this shared place more enjoyable and might be an important method of surviving in a difficult world.
