Who: Katie Parker and eka.gren
What: Art 1A Artist Talk
When: Tuesday, November 28 from 12:30-1:45
Where: Chemistry 1171
Website: https://www.ekagren.com
Artist Bio:
eka.gren is the collective pseudonym for work created in collaboration between three sisters: Emily, a welder and auto mechanic in rural Missouri; Katherine, an artist and educator in Southern California; and Anna, a doctoral candidate in Epidemiology at the University of California- Berkeley. eka.gren was created in early 2022 as a persona that could be implemented to present an opaque, singular authorship while still remaining representative of the collaborative influence of the 3 authors. The sisters’ work under eka.gren comes from both their individual and collective perspectives from an upbringing surrounded almost exclusively by a large community of female relatives in the rural midwest, as well as complicated histories relating to queerness, religion, and care. This perspective is also representative of their current passions and pursuits in our relative fields- the mechanical, the artistic, and the biological. Much of the idea behind eka.gren is a love letter between the individual and the collective experience as well as the intentional concealment of the individual into the collective as a form of fuzzy protection to transfer disgust, peek below the visible, and to ultimately eat with those you trust and swallow those you love.