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Performative Practices

📆  June 6, 2025 🕐 5:00 PM – 5:00 PM 📍 Main Gallery 💰 Free open to ages: All

Main Gallery Exhibition
June 6th - July 23rd, 2025

Opening Reception
June 6th from 5-8 PM

Performative Practices expounds upon the weight and space digital technology holds within our lives. Artists Kate Burke and Jessica Swank enter into a dialogue that examines what it means to encounter digital technology so intimately and consistently, using labor as a mechanism to reiterate our interactions with it.

As humans, our day to day encounters with digital technology prove to be both intimate and redundant. The ways in which we respond and interact with technology are often ritualistic, hypnotic and yet tedious. Repetitive thoughts, the collecting of physical detritus, and the pain associated with severing (or mending) the physical self, are all private, intimate labors. Today, these inherently intimate and human labors are recontextualized through technology and machinery: they are given a public platform, and the formerly private work of being human is now on full, technological display. Are these actions meditative or addictive? At this point, humans and machines no longer exist at opposite poles. They reside on a spectrum, with much overlap between them. How do we understand our human selves in this new, non-human context? The tedious labor employed in the creation of many of these pieces not only mimics the ways in which we interact with technology, but also exist as a form of reclamation over what it means to be human and the intimate losses of ourselves from the tedious and relentless experience of technology and the machine. 

Artist Information

Kate Burke

Biography

Kate Burke (b. 1994) is an Atlanta-based musician, artist, and performer. After receiving her BFA in Fabric Design in 2016 with honors from the University of Georgia, she moved to Atlanta in 2017 and shortly thereafter immersed herself within the Atlanta art community. Her solo career has developed steadily since moving to Atlanta, with solo and group showings throughout the United States in spaces such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Atlanta Contemporary, Hartsfield Jackson International Airport, Lyndon House Art Center, the Dalton Gallery at Agnes Scott, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville, Free Market Gallery, ATHICA, whitespec, Art Fields, Waiting Room Art, and Mint Atlanta. Kate has received distinguished awards such as the ArtFields Category Award for textiles in 2019, and has a growing list of fellowships including being a two-time Hambidge Center fellow, a former member of the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artists, a resident at Long Meadow Artist Residency, and a Leap Year Artist with MINT in Atlanta, GA. Kate is currently a part of the Creatives Project Residency in Atlanta, GA through 2025.

Artist Statement

Having grown up in Southern Baptist culture, the questions of control, sin, and self-acceptance recurred as themes throughout my development. What was truly “holy”? What did it mean when you saw Southern hospitality swapped for power and oppression? These metaphysical questions ultimately led me away from Christianity into a deeper desire to understand spirituality through the lens of human evolution: what emphasis did environment and cultural context have on my emotional, mental, and spiritual disposition? Why were so many people who called themselves Christians devout but deeply unhappy? Why was I so deeply unhappy?

Through the process of eliminating conditioned thought patterns, I recognized a new problem. What was I going to put in their place? As I began to exorcise the God-void, I was greeted with a new suitor: The Internet and All Its Reverberating Thoughts. Thoughts that relentlessly and seamlessly read my mail out loud to me everyday, always. An endless mirror:

“Are you good enough? The numbers don’t lie.”

My obsession with the internet and its spiritual effect on humans ultimately led me to discover the concept of “Metaphysical poetry:” a genre of poetry that muses philosophical concepts through intense and dissonant imagery, complex metaphors, and perhaps even whimsical or contradictory language to pontificate about the human experience. With the social sphere of the internet being shepherded by the company “Meta” and my bend towards craft to make my ideas “physical”--I use the traditional, intimate, and intentional technologies of the human experience (textiles and ceramics) to dissect my philosophical discussions about the fleeting yet pervasive effects of cellular devices and other ethereal digital platforms on Homo Sapiens. Does our time on the Internet provide a mental framework that mirrors the magnitude of effects that an intense religious upbringing can have on a person? How easy is it for me to fall into that framework, and how do I wiggle away if I want out? By switching from ethereal textile works to heavy ceramic mosaics, I can empathetically force the viewers into bodily responding to the weight, heaviness, or intangible nature of a spiritual or philosophical idea, paving way for a greater connection with our felt sense and ability to critically tap into a side of ourselves that is often shut away in today’s society.

Jessica Swank

Biography

Jessica Swank is an interdisciplinary artist, currently based in Greenville, SC. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, at galleries such as Millepiani in Rome, Italy, Plexus Projects in Brooklyn, NY, and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) in Gimpo, South Korea. She has been recognized by Musée Magazine’s “Woman Crush Wednesday,” Fraction Magazine, and Porridge Magazine.

Swank is a founding member and Marketing Director of Zero Space Collective, a contemporary artist collective with a network across the Eastern US. Zero Space strives to make space for underrepresented artists and serve as an equitable and accessible resource. Since it’s founding in 2020, Swank has assisted in developing the collective as well as curating and organizing exhibitions and digital promotions for artists.

Swank earned her MFA from Clemson University in Visual Arts and BA from Anderson University. An artist and educator, Swank has taught and led numerous classes, workshops and panel discussions across the Southeast. She has gained funding for her work from a number of local institutions, including the South Carolina Arts Commission. Swank is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Gallery Coordinator at the South Carolina School of the Arts at Anderson University.

Artist Statement

This work addresses the relationship between humans and digital technology from a personal perspective. Intersections of organic and synthetic materials function as a metaphor for the blurred boundaries between humans and machines. By utilizing various methods of self-extension, fragmentation, and recontextualization, I attempt to depict the merging of these entities. Many of the pieces include remnants of myself or those close to me, abject traces of our own existence. Flesh-like membranes represent extensions of myself and use my own skin tone as a form of self-portraiture. Combined with both natural and manufactured objects, I view these works as relatives to the cyborg. Technology allows for the duplication and extension of the self, and simultaneously aids us in the subversion of labor for the sake of convenience. In response, I've created works in which the materials and structures that are present may feel familiar, yet entirely separate from the human form. When examined closely, the systems between the technological and biological world are not so different. It is easy to blur the lines between them when the digital world is carefully modeled to mimic that with which we are familiar. In documenting the interplay between material, gesture, and my own fragmented body, these works construct a narrative of interdependence, tension, disembodiment, and inseparability.