Geheim Gallery is pleased to present, The Drama of Vitality, a show of new free-standing and wall based ceramic sculptures by Bellingham and New York City-based Kate Rusek. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Eclectic surfaces that appear in Rusek’s work are drawn from a direct casting process of disposable health and fertility medical waste for which they stand in for imagined reproductive marine microfauna. Rusek combines these details with geometric forms that both represent the human body and microscopic organic architectures to stand in for the connective forces of planetary reproduction. These totemic objects reference regeneration and growth, the horror of consumptive striving, and copious ecosystems that form the base of life supporting food chains. This body of work stands as a marker to address the high-tech, low-biodiversity dystopia that’s creeping across the planet. A need to imagine what we should replace it with is vital. The artist invites us into an intimate looking as  practice to more keenly see the planet and our communities as grounds for flourishing. The already gorgeous world becomes even more beautiful the closer one looks.

Influenced by complex organic architectures, man-made environmental catastrophes, and eco-social systems, Kate Rusek assembles highly tactile sculptures, textiles, and installations with an emphasis on craft and materiality. Her work transmutes waste matter into abundant, maximalist, composite forms and dynamic biophilic textures that interrogate assigned value, material narrative, and a rigid binary of what is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. Their work examines the interconnected —at times contradictory— relationship between humanity, material culture, and the natural world.