Bio:
Satpreet Kahlon is a Panjabi-born artist based in Brooklyn. She received a full-fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2019.
In addition to her studio practice, which has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artforum, she co-founded and -ran an Indigenous arts organization that supported 400 artists with over $2m of opportunities and rematriated 1.5 acres of greenspace that was slated for development during her tenure from 2017-2023. For this work, she was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine in 2019 and was a 2022 Roddenberry Fellow for “new and innovative strategies to safeguard human rights and ensure an equal and just society for all.”
Satpreet’s practice has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Critical Minded, Vermont Studio Center, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, the RISD Museum, 4Culture, Henry Art Gallery, the Magnum Foundation, Brown University, the Neddy Award, and others.
She recently had a solo exhibition at the Bellevue Art Museum, where she won the Biennial Curatorial Excellence Award in 2022.
Statement:
My practice is concerned with illegibility, inscrutability, failure, and collapse. Beginning with the understanding that most Indigenous cultures are existing in a post-apocalyptic reality, I approach the act of building sculpture as a kind of prayer: a futile attempt to communicate with and better know generations of lost, unknowable histories. An endlessly looping signal without reply.
The sculptures themselves are precarious and messy, comprised of ubiquitous consumer goods (wooden pallets, cardboard, textiles) that I salvage and then manipulate with raw earthen materials (beeswax, lime, soil, plant fiber, pigment) in an attempt to remove them from a capitalist framework and re-establish their subjecthood.
In this way, they are stand-ins for our bodies, and through their transformation I ask if we, too, can be transformed, made human, and find our way back to the earth.
email: dr.spatula(at)gmail(dot)com
CV: click here