Meet the 2023 Fellows: Kia Wassenaar
Published on August 7, 2023. Interview by 2023 Summer Intern, Rachel McGinnis.
Kia Wassenaar (she/her) is a writer and multimedia artist working in film, textiles, and digital imagery. During her 2023 New City Arts Fellowship, Kia explored the strangeness of memory mediated by technology through a multimedia textile and video landscape.
First, the most important question: What food would you reach for first in a food fight and why?
Mashed potatoes, maybe? Kind of soft and goopy but would make a good splat on impact.
How did you interpret the theme “soft spot” and how do you see it realized in what you’ve produced for this exhibition?
For this exhibition I made literal, tactile soft landscapes, and it felt lucky to work in a medium – tufting/textile – that lent itself so well to the idea of a “soft spot.” It was fun to be a little bit on the nose in that respect, while also using video elements to dig deeper into the more abstract questions of the theme. Memory feels like one of the ultimate, ever evolving, unformed pieces of the human experience, and it was exciting to explore it through the use of altered home videos. Photographs and videos can function as an entry point for remembering, but sometimes they actually change or warp the memory itself. The pieces I made for this exhibition are trying to explore the warmth that can exist in remembering this way, as well as the dissonance.
How would you describe your experience as an Artist Fellow with New City Arts?
So happy and refreshing <3 Having a dedicated studio space felt like such a luxury and I found it really grounding to work around a specific theme for the duration of the fellowship. It’s interesting how narrowing the scope of your work for a period, really focusing in on one idea/medium/method can actually reinvigorate your entire practice. Or that’s how the fellowship felt for me. Some of the pieces I made for this exhibition were things I’d never tried before! Especially the mixed media with tufting + video – that idea had been floating around in my head for a while and this fellowship gave me the incentive to actually execute it. And I learned so much from experimenting in that way. Not just in how I’ll think about making pieces like this differently/better next time, but also in my understanding of how mediums can intermingle in my work going forward.
How has Charlottesville impacted your artistic work and life as an artist?
Charlottesville is my hometown and where I went to university, so it’s shaped virtually every aspect of my artistic practice! It’s funny, I’ve been away from home a lot lately and coming back here I’ve just been struck by how ridiculously lush and green Virginia is in the summer. Like even driving down the highway, all the plants on the side of the road are so dense and jungley. And all the rolling hills! The little valley we’re nestled in. So much natural beauty here that’s wild and inspiring.
What motivates you to produce art?
Like a lot of people, I was compelled by the power of stories and storytelling from a pretty young age. The first art I took up was writing and I think it set me on a path of imagination. I’ve always been able to visualize things very clearly in my head, so writing worked what felt like essential mental muscles growing up. Getting in that habit early on – of making without too much trepidation, as a form of play and exploration rather than something serious – is what has led me down so many wonderful creative paths.
It’s definitely what led me to filmmaking, which truly felt like an entire universe had opened up in front of me when I first started to seriously explore it. And still does. But there are so many forms of art, each with its own powers, constraints, and opportunities, and my curiosity about all those possibilities, that’s rooted in storytelling and all the different ways you can tell a story, still feels like a potent force in my life, that thankfully leaves so much beauty and fun in its wake.
How do your other interests and responsibilities influence your art?
I worked for a few years during undergrad at the UVA digital media lab where I was dealing with digitizing a lot of old analog media, scanning film and VHS tapes and whatnot, and I think that gave me a strong interest in the aesthetics of kind of recently-obsolete technology and technology in general. How it physically works, but also how we’ve kind of generated all this imagery/information and don’t know what to do with it once the technology changes, how we feel attached to it, how the technology changes us and the way we think/remember, etc. Those questions have been coming up more and more in my recent work.
What have you learned about yourself as a person through the experience of making art?
So many things! I think it’s taught me that I really do love the process itself, and can get really lost in the minutiae of a new medium or technique. And not just in an art-making sense but also like, sewing up a hole in my pants, putting together a piece of furniture, whatever. Like stupid stuff. I can just get lost in these project-y tasks and get a lot of enjoyment out of them. And learning that you can pretty much enjoy doing anything, at least for a time, as long as you approach it with curiosity and care – that’s been a really wonderful realization.
I’ve also learned that I can be a huge control freak. And sometimes that’s helpful and sometimes it’s not. But making art, especially films, where so much of the process is collaborative, has taught me a lot about keeping everything in balance. Knowing when to step up and when to step back/create space. Which is really fulfilling in its own way too.
What do you do for rest?
I mean, definitely just being horizontal. Like for real, bodily rest, being horizontal is the only answer. But for more active rest, walking. I used to hate walking and now I feel like it’s pretty much the best way I can spend time. I think the more time I spend outside generally the better I feel. Also just being with some good friends. Playing cards or really any kind of game. I’m a little obsessed with games – learning new ones, teaching people ones I love. Golf is a GREAT card game, Spades if you’ve got four people, Crazy 8’s and Yahtzee are favorites too. Love games. Think about them all the time.
The New City Arts Fellowship creates space, time, and financial support for Charlottesville-area artists to make work in response to an annual open call and proposal theme. At the conclusion of the fellowship, work created by each Artist Fellow is presented in a group exhibition. This year’s theme is entitled Soft Spot by Marisa Williamson. This open call invited artists to consider the ways their work reveals unseen openings, sites of ongoing growth, unfused structures, and delicate parts that require gentleness and care. Artists spent their creative fellowship developing their interpretations of their soft spots, and shared the products of that work in the group exhibition.
