Kat Geng: Lost in the Found

January 13 – February 25, 2018
 

Kat Geng: Lost in the Found
Exhibition Dates: January 13–February 25, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13, 7–10 pm
Special Event: Sip, Sculpt, Slurp: a Stone Soup-Inspired Soirée with Kat Geng and Iso Rabins, February 9, 7–9 pm

Royal NoneSuch Gallery presents Kat Geng: Lost in the Found, a solo exhibition of sculptural work by Bay Area based artist, Kat Geng. With an almost religious devotion to familiar household objects, Geng’s works are deceptively simple. The  wildly imaginative sculptures on view in Lost in the Found transport viewers into Geng’s strange and curious world, one that is both playful and menacing, deeply personal and universal.

Akin to previous generations of artists working in assemblage—from Robert Rauschenberg to Bruce Conner—Geng combines scavenged objects, which she often finds on the street. Decontextualizing familiar items such as phones, rubber gloves, and umbrellas, Geng transforms them into uncanny manifestations of memories and fears rooted deep in the subconscious. With a profound openness to materials, the satisfying chaos of Geng’s compositions demonstrates her democratic approach to the material world she inhabits.

Lost in the Found, Geng’s second solo show in the Bay Area, showcases her ongoing interest in how we assign emotional authority to objects and spaces—a familiar chair can calm the nerves, or basement stairs can instill fear. In her sculpture Safety Coat, the artist covers a winter jacket in objects including a comb, a plastic banana, and a spoon, playfully digging into the human experience of fear and our sometimes-futile coping mechanisms. The items on the coat are not ones typically associated with safety, so by including them in her sculpture and titling it Safety Coat, Geng invites us to examine the relationships we construct between fear, danger, and safety.

Artist Bio:
Kat Geng (b. 1979, Bogotá, Colombia) received a B.A. in art history from Bard College, and she was trained in art conservation at The Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Massachusetts. Geng has exhibited at The Luggage Store Gallery, Pro Arts Gallery, Root Division, and Incline Gallery, and in 2017 she received an Artist Activator grant from CounterPulse, San Francisco. Geng’s studio practice is based in San Francisco.