Come and celebrate the opening of Kate Raudenbush’s solo exhibition at Delight Factory!
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Glyphs are symbols that convey information, emotions, energy or allegory through graphic shapes. They are similar to symbolic figures or characters, such as the Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphs, that were historically carved in relief. For Raudenbush’s own creative practice, this abstract steel series is an ongoing exploration of personal experience, incantation, and commentary on our humanity. She crafts the glyphs to feel otherworldly, like an unearthed relic of a mysterious civilization, carrying an allegorical message that is meant to be be decoded. All of the shapes are made from the laser-cut steel “drop” from her larger sculptures, such as Star Seed, Future’s Past, Wishing Tree, As Above So Below, and others. In this way, these Glyphs are the subconscious manifestations of these heavily engineered sculptures, yet, they are composed in a flow state of a more instinctual art creation process.
When visiting this show, you will also get to see Kate Raudenbush’s first indoor installations, commissioned for the Delight Factory space itself: The Oculus Root Portal and Garden of Delight.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kate Raudenbush is a New York-based, Burning Man-bred sculpture artist and designer. She learned early on to creatively adapt to her surroundings as her family relocated 6 times to 4 different countries by the age of 14, where she observed clearly that “the most unifying and uplifting identifiers of humanity are its cultural expressions. What we cherish and what we create represents who we are. Art is a conduit through which humanity understands itself.”
Once an intern for Mtv, and then a professional photographer in the theatre and entertainment worlds of New York City, she shape-shifted again through transformational playa dust and creative community to reinvent herself as as a self-taught sculptor, becoming one of the most prolific solo female artists at Burning Man since 1999. Kate evolved to create the first Burning Man sculpture to be collected straight from the desert and into the permanent collection of a US museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, in 2007.
Since then, she has sought to challenge herself to roam an unconventional creative path: from a remote artist residency near the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea, to the creation of a monolithic gateway sculpture leading to the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada, to designing a massive winged soundstage in Amsterdam for Mysteryland, the longest running EDM festival in Europe. In 2019, she received the National Citizen Artist Award from Americans for the Arts at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington DC. She used her award speech to encourage US Mayors to mobilize and shape their cities to address climate change.
Kate’s words and work have been published and exhibited in shows from the record-breaking No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, to the Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea, to red carpet sculptures honoring female directors for the American Film Institute Film Festival in Hollywood. Allegorical artworks have been created for international art fairs from Scope in Miami and Art SouthHampton, to festivals and civic squares in Las Vegas, Santiago Chile, Montreal Canada, Tulum Mexico, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Washington DC, San Francisco, and New York City.
Exhibition closes on December 24, 2021