Book overview
Assembling California, Assembling Self is the first monograph by transdiscplinary artist Ashwini Bhat, and traces her long-term personal survey of California's ecology in this time of climate change, shifting habits, and devastating forest fires. Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, Bhat works in sculpture, ceramics, installation, and video, developing a unique visual language exploring the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Her work shows the influence of syncretic shrines and rituals and non-logocentric and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the non-human. Bhat sees her work, in part, as an act of mapping and remapping consciousness, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive, with an emphasis on the transformative aspects of place.
This monograph will weave a comprehensive selection of images from this body of work with newly commissioned essays by Leah Ollman, Glenn Adamson, and Jenni Sorkin that will contextualize her practice in relation to the worlds of poetry, ceramic craft, and Californian art history, respectively. These longer essays are interspersed with smaller texts by several curators Bhat has worked with, illuminating the ways in which these recent exhibitions are part of the larger and ongoing Assembling California, Assembling Self project.
Resonances is co-published with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.