Serious Play with Kat Geng
This! Here's an excerpt from a humbling interview with self-described “itinerant” Colombian-American artist Kat Geng:
Kat Geng (KG): "... I did an installation called "If I Had a Bathroom" on a 16-foot box truck in a parking lot at The Parking Lot Art Fair. That was really exciting to me because it was the beginning of me experimenting with shared experiences and immersive installations.
We live in all these people’s homes and it’s very intimate. I live among all of their belongings, I have a good sense, not of every aspect of their lives, but certain things that are generally more private. And we’re total strangers. They’re not friends, often they become friends but they don’t usually start as friends. And I was thinking what is one of the rooms that feel the most private besides the bedroom, which has a whole other set of associations. The bathroom. That’s where we all get naked. Store our medications, get diarrhea, recover from a long night out, preen, and hygiene. So what if I do a role-reversal and create my own bathroom and invite strangers in, which I’ve never had here, what would that look like? And perhaps they take a bath or make themselves at home, in a way. They put on a bathtub suit and come and relax. And I had this friend of mine from childhood, Katrina Goldsaito, a wonderful writer and performer, she had her pajamas on and was strumming the guitar and singing songs in a very unrehearsed natural way. Sometimes she would pick up on something we were talking about and it was never from finish to end. She was singing to herself, sitting on the toilet.
I had this moment where I was in the tub with a woman and her son and I had all of these toys velcroed to the wall that you could play with. And I didn't know them at all. First of all, you’re in very close proximity—
Danielle Wright (DW): I know! I was in it! (laughter)
KG: Yeah! You know! (laughter) That was so exciting to me. I don’t know that I want to recreate that, but I want to experiment.
DW: Was it exciting because you were connecting with people in a way that would never have happened if not for that piece?
KG: Yes, we were strangers but we skipped all the formalities and went straight to play. It was oddly comfortable. And also—you’re not physically removed from it like when looking at a piece on a gallery wall. You are a part of the art. Physically within it. That’s exciting because you have no control over it, as the artist, none. The viewer is as much a part of creating whatever that art is as the artist. And I feel like this with a lot of my sculptures. I kind of just set the scene and maybe give a certain tone, like a playful environment with bright colors. Within a sculpture, there’s a car on this cloth, and there’s a shoelace, and maybe that's a curvy road. It requires your imagination to complete the piece whether it’s a sculpture or an installation."
Read the rest here!
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