Description:
Assembling California, Assembling Self is the first monograph by transdiscplinary artist Ashwini Bhat, and traces her long-term personal survey of California's ecology in this time of climate change, shifting habits, and devastating forest fires. 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.
This monograph will weave a comprehensive selection of images from this body of work with newly commissioned essays by Leah Ollman, Glenn Adamson, and Jenni Sorkin that will contextualize her practice in relation to the worlds of poetry, ceramic craft, and Californian art history, respectively. These longer essays are interspersed with smaller texts by several curators Bhat has worked with, illuminating the ways in which these recent exhibitions are part of the larger and ongoing Assembling California, Assembling Self project.
Resonances is co-published with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Brief description: Ashwini Bhat (b. 1980, India) 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 and 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, 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.