What: Artist Talk with Kate Saubestre
Artist Bio:
Kate Saubestre is a French-American artist currently based out of Santa Barbara, California. Working from a background in scenic production, her work frequently examines how built environments promote specific ideologies and influence psychological experiences in everyday spaces. For the past decade she has been grappling with her own national identity and environment, as an American citizen “returning” to the United States after never having formerly lived there, conflating offshore imagery and idyllic personal memories with adult first-hand experiences that involve the more complex nuances and realities of the nation she began to unearth as an adult—a reality that was filled with cars, convenience and capitalism, ridden with detrimental societal and environmental consequences which continue to unfold in real time.
Kate Saubestre received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and, after working in theatrical production, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is presently investigating the discourse surrounding the notion of nature as a social construct, the Western ethos of placing nature at a distance or as an “other” and how the ramifications to the current ecological crisis. Saubestre’s practice is also guided by a decision to work with materials from discarded, post-consumer, or natural sources, in an attempt to minimize the carbon footprint and ecological waste she produces as an artist.
