Kate Casanova is a Minneapolis-based visual artist who explores ideas about nature through sculpture, video, performance, and collage. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Le Poisson Rouge in New York, The Beijing Film Academy in China, and Station to Station, a US-traversing mobile art train. Casanova has created a site-specific artwork for Leav, a mobile platform for viewing digital art that will launch at Northern Spark. She is a 2014 recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. In 2012, she was named visual Artist of the Year by City Pages and featured on MN Original, a Twin Cities Public Television series. She is currently by the Kolman & Pryor Gallery in Minneapolis.
I create visceral worlds in which sensation trumps language; where unconscious yearning seethes beneath skin and under tongues. In these surreal landscapes, fungi grow out of furniture, crustaceans crawl on heads, land masses float in spacelessness. Hair, crystals, lava, fur, and ice become textures that fold into themselves, expand and contract in an ever shifting state of becoming. Insects swarm, vines overtake, and eggs burst. Fueled by a mythos of visual and material seduction, this world offers up an alluring entropy that pulses with the crushing proliferation of life. I blend conceptual and process-based methodologies freely, equally inspired by ideas and material. My interdisciplinary practice oscillates between sculpture, video, performance, and collage – a result of both intuition and experimentation. I explore human responses to natural phenomenon such as attraction and repulsion, awe and unease that allows us to question how we assign value to the more-than-human world.