Hello! I am glad you’ve found your way to my website. Here’s a little bit about me and what I do!
I would love to say, “I am from here!” but, I find that statement difficult… I’ve lived the longest in Katy, TX (just outside of Houston), so I’ll use that as my answer. Most of my life has consisted of moving to new places and it wasn’t until I moved to Katy at the start of middle school that I had lived in one place for more than 4 years… (I was there for 7). Norman came next, where I completed my undergraduate degree in Studio Arts at the University of Oklahoma. It is where I found my home in the arts community and started on a path that I never would have predicted. Now, I am in Chicago, IL, starting my graduate program in Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago!
It seems necessary at this point to say something like “This is what I’m interested in and what my work is about!” That would lead to a list that would go on forever though. I believe that art making is influenced by everything we have come into contact with, so therefore, my influence list is my entire history.
Instead, I’ll give you this…
I am an installation artist that mainly works with clay. Recently, I’ve started to incorporate fibers and organic materials into my process to explore how materials can suggest permanence and impermanence. I believe that everything in our life is temporary, and I try to find ways to document our experiences while creating new ones in my work. For that reason, all my installations are temporary — as most installations are. At the end, I deconstruct and redistribute pieces of the larger whole (you’ll be able to find those in my shop once those installations come down and I get the shop set up…).
Recently, the start to my graduate studies has been a shock to the system. This city is huge compared to Norman, OK, but somehow it still has a local small town feel… So far, it feels like somewhere I could call home and I’m interested to see how this city changes me and my work…
It feels like the start of a new era for me, but I don’t know what that era will look like… After installing my last body of work, “Meditations,” at Hojas Artspace in Goldsby, OK, I felt a shift. That series of work feels complete. The discoveries I made about my aesthetics, idea cultivation, and physical execution have been invaluable, and parts of that series will always continue to influence what I do moving forward because it was the first time I fully invested in installation.
Isn’t that the point though?
Anyways, while that series was up/going up, I became more involved in rock climbing. I realize this is kind of a random shift, but I promise it will make sense! That series was about memory, experience, self-discovery/understanding, and calm. Rock climbing became part of that calm. A sort of problem solving and physical exertion I needed so that my brain wasn’t buzzing constantly.
— a little side note on the Meditations series. It allowed me to understand my relationship between culture and heritage as an Indian American. It was something that seems like it should be obvious, but for some reason it wasn’t. I am influenced and shaped by both. There is no reason to have to choose which one I am more like because I am both.
^ so that discovery is important for this next thought.
As I spent two days driving with my dad from Houston, TX to Chicago, IL, I realized we have a lot more in common than I thought. At my age, my father spent almost every weekend climbing and hiking and adventuring –> something that has only recently become appealing to me. It is something that spans across cultures.
Cultures.
That is my interest. How do they blend? How do the influence? How do they redefine what is happening now? How do they define what has already passed?
Finding commonalities — like rock climbing and adventuring — across cultures and histories is what I have been drawn to recently. My body of work this semester (and potentially over the next few years) seems to be drawn to the questions I posed above. My hope is to create environments and spaces to understand how people blend and are already blended.
I hope you decide to follow me on this journey. I’d love your ideas and thoughts about cultures and those blends. Comment on this post or shoot me an email from my “Contact” section.
Thank you for checking out my work and my newly designed website!
~Reva
Reva Kashikar 