Exhibitions

KAY DARTT + RONDA WRIGHT

UT Downtown Gallery / 106 S. Gay St. January 6, 2023 - February 25, 2023

Kay Dartt, Ronda Wright

As an artist and activist, Wright created the on-going sculptural installation, Creating Artifacts of Home. Nearly a decade ago she founded a social justice platform: SAFE – Social Action For Equality, facilitating a series of national workshops titled "Creating Artifacts of Home," currently an ongoing project with participants from all over the world. Started in response to the overwhelming rate of LGBTQ+ homelessness, bullying, and suicide, the premise of these workshops are that we all have a relation to home; and that iron, is an element necessary to sustain life. While engaging in conversation, participants create a symbolic artifact that reminds them of home, the artifact is then cast in iron and installed as part of a larger collection of artifacts that reflect relations of Home.

Dartt’s work fluctuates between functional sculpture, speculative design, and embodied hyperobject. The goal of these objects is to challenge our western philosophies of living that have created an imbalance between the natural, artificial and virtual environments we occupy. By synthesizing biomorphic forms, consumer language and parametric design processes, an aesthetic emerges that invites a critical perspective of our environment. At times these objects can humorous, whimsical or enigmatic.

Kay Dartt is an artist whose practice combines sculpture, engineering, education and community outreach. As a Clinical Assistant Professor of Art at Shepherd University, she teaches sculpture courses, engineering courses and manages an interdisciplinary fabrication space called the FASTEnER Lab.

The UT Downtown Gallery is pleased to be a Tennessee Triennial Community Venue. All events are free and open to the public.