KASIA OZGA

I treat the products of our culture as physical remains of our bodies and explore how we generate objects as physical extensions of ourselves. With man-made forms, materials, and processes, I extend, inhibit, and modify elements of the human body. I reuse, up-cycle, and revalue regular, standardized, and mass-produced materials into something one-of-a-kind and special to invert the associations we make with different types of detritus. My raw materials are manufactured products with a particular use history and product life cycle. Whether bastardized industrially produced goods in the white cube or surreal interventions in public spaces, my work explores the limits of functionality and worth. I give a human dimension to physical sites by foregrounding their historical/narrative aspects and input human features into sterile goods by cutting, breaking, gluing, and carving them into forms that evoke the human body. These artworks are at once physical things and conceptual spaces. Through the physical labor and limitations of my own body, I questions which bodies are present and missing in political and cultural discourses. I explore the anatomical potential of the female body as a material metaphor for our actions that ask viewers whether our current situation is fixed or not and how change can emerge.

Ozga received her PhD at EDESTA University of Paris 8, France in 2013 and her MFA in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Poland in 2006. She in currently working between Chicago and Paris.