Kat Kazlauskas

Commissioned by The Honolulu Mayor’s Office of Culture and Arts in 2021(installed April 2022), Adventitious Roots was my response to the call for submission—Aloha ‘Āina (love of the land). Coming out of the pandemic, we were faced with an adventitious opportunity to learn and instill the ways of Aloha ‘Āina for the future. We saw what a lack of overwhelming tourism could look like. We had concrete examples of how and why Hawai‘i should be more agriculturally self sufficient. The reasons to curtail and hold accountable military occupation were crystal clear. There was a window of opportunity to create lasting change. Aloha ‘Āina is all embracing for those who embrace it. It is a way of being and seeing through the lens of connection, the connection of all things.

The Hala (pandanus) tree is ubiquitous across Oceania. It is resilient, and all of its parts are utilized. Mo‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian folklore) is full of tales about the Hala being a finder of water and a harbinger of endings and/or new beginnings. In this sculptural abstraction, The roots are made of steel—the same material that has enabled the path from Mauka (mountain) to Makai (ocean) to be broken by skyscrapers. The trunk and fronds are comprised of plastics intercepted from the waste stream and community sourced through social media. The reclaimed and collected plastics represent the present state of our planet—ever-changed by our forced reliance upon fossil fuels. The solar powered beacon of light represents the possibility that our future can be brighter than our present. This sculpture stands tall and defiant because standing tall and speaking in defiance is our best chance at a better future. 

*Adventitious can be defined as—

1. something happening by chance instead of by design: as in, the pandemic has created adventitious circumstances showing us ways things can be different, and better; 

2. something coming from outside (not native): as in, Hawai‘i and Oceania have been inundated by adventitious forces for generations—colonizers, militarization, tourism, pollution, climate crisis induced environmental degradation, and sea level rise; 

3. something formed in an unusual anatomical position, (e.g., prop roots): as in, as a human collective we can form adventitious roots, through community and collective relationships, to stabilize us during the unexpected, and generate sustainable resources for the future.

Within/Without was installed at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Art Gallery for my Master of Fine Arts thesis in Spring 2020.

Within/Without is an invitation to engage with the emotions we face living within a world of uncertainty, without concrete solutions. It is a physical manifestation of my own emotional entanglements in trying to imagine ways out of climate chaos.

I am questioning how we can create space for consciously cultivated hope and understanding within a present where history is being written by each and every one of us.

I received 600 pounds of ghost net [1] from Ocean Voyages Institute [2]—just a “tiny” portion of an 80,000-pound haul of fossil fuel derived plastic waste from the Pacific Gyre [3]. I view this “gift of garbage” as a bold metaphor for the micro and macro challenges we face as inhabitants of Earth. The installation offers abstractions of clichéd iconography, through a Pepper’s Ghost illusion in which a sheet of glass is used as an optical beam splitter to superimpose one scene upon another. Neon, light, and mirrors create further illusions within the space. The neon flashes SOS as its electrical charge evokes capitalism’s rapacity to consume, while the use of glass alludes to our ecological fragility.

[1] Ghost nets are abandoned or lost fishing nets that catch and entangle each other—often in giant masses that ensnare marine mammals and damage coral reefs.

[2] Ocean Voyages Institute is a nonprofit organization based in Sausalito, California that was founded in 1979 by a group of conservationists, educators, and international sailors. They are focused on the preservation of our oceans and education, especially of our youth, to find ways to stop the abuse of our oceans by single use plastic and thoughtless commercial practices.

https://www.oceanvoyagesinstitute.org

[3] The North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone, a.k.a., the Pacific Gyre is one of the five main gyres worldwide where wind-driven surface currents converge in our oceans. These gyres collect massive amounts of plastic waste that not only appear on the surface but infiltrate deep into the water column as a sort of “ocean smog.”

https://www.5gyres.org/faq

Aupuni Space. Honolulu, Hawai’i. 2019

Materials: Oyster spacers collected by Sustainable Coastlines Hawai’i and the artist, monofilament, jute, armature wire.

SPECTRES: Disembodied spirits, a.k.a. ghosts; haunting perturbations of the mind that are often harbingers of unpleasant or dreadful events.

As I work with these materials that wash up on our shores from other places and other lives, I wonder about their origins and journeys the havoc they have wreaked upon the ecosystems and inhabitants of our oceans and coastal communities. This installation is an encapsulation of how I feel being faced with the overwhelming amount of a singular object—oyster spacers collected by Sustainable Coastlines Hawai’i volunteers—and the fear that the very near future is one where our beaches and waterways are literally suffocated with plastic waste. Simultaneously, I find an unsettling beauty in these.

Tokyo Midtown Street Museum. Roppongi, Japan. 2019

Materials: Oyster spacers collected by Sustainable Coastlines Hawai‘i, jute twine, steel wire, hollow core steel.

Dimensions: 7’ x 3’ x 3’

I often see my work as living beings—able to evolve in response to space and place.

“The One. The Few, The Many.” was required to stand on its own for the Tokyo Midtown Street Museum. Rather than build a stand to hold the piece as it existed on a wall, I chose to design a structure that integrated with and animated the work—allowing it to evolve into a completely new sculpture that still carries the weight and message of the first iteration.

2019

Materials: Oyster spacers collected by Sustainable Coastlines Hawai‘i, jute twine

7’ x 4’ x 2.5’

This work represents a tiny portion of the vast amount of plastic detritus that washes up on the shores of Hawai‘i from other parts of the world, EVERY DAY. 

Within this work are some rare findings: several oyster spacers that coral began to grow upon and the single yellow one I have found among the several thousand I have sorted so far. The oyster spacer is a foreign object to most people--the only place we are likely to encounter them is washed up on our beaches. I chose to use these objects as opposed to recognizable objects because I believe if we can be faced with such a mass of the unknown washing up on our shores, then we are more likely to begin to grasp how much plastic detritus is out there that is recognizable from our everyday.

The work is a reference to our capacity to make a change by taking a stand against complacency and apathy. The single yellow spacer completely changes the aesthetic of the sculpture, not despite but because it is the odd one out in a mass of similar—just as a single person/action/idea can change the course of a community. The few spacers with evidence of coral growth upon them represent each person/community influenced by that person/action/idea to change certain behaviors with future generations in mind. On the surface this is about plastic pollution, but the world is not that compartmentalized—we are all connected, and actions cross over borders, boundaries, oceans, economic and social structures, gender politics, production, consumption, distribution, and waste management (to name a few). The world is getting smaller and these knots are getting tighter as all of these collectively global issues entangle us further. 

Do we learn to weave a web of connection and support or do we strangle ourselves in unbreakable knots and tangles?

2019

Materials: Found army man toy, gelatin

Encountering plastic trash on the beaches of O’ahu is common. Finding items like this toy is more of a rarity. In my experiments with gelatin suspension of the plastics, this one is representational of the feeling one gets when engaging in beach clean ups—you feel like you are fighting for something but getting nowhere.

2018

Oyster spacers collected by Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii‘i, aluminum channel, hot glue, sisal

Variable dimensions

The control we assume over nature and our environment is a farce. We are completely out of control and have no idea how to fix the messes we have created.

This work attempts to illustrate this predicament we, as humans, find ourselves within. The oyster spacer is a perfect example of waste removed from reality. When we decadently order oysters, we do not think about how they are cultivated or why they are cultivated. But, as far as aquaculture goes, the oyster is one of the most controlled and manipulated species. Without human involvement, oysters grow upon each other, on rocks, and wherever else they find a landing. Entanglement encapsulates this whereas Channel illustrates our definition of what we, humans, think it should be.

2018

Oyster Spacers collected by Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii‘i, sisal, wood, eye hooks

Spatial Dysplasia, THE BOX JELLY. HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I.

Synapses arose from my interest in how the brain trains itself based on our habitual actions. The construction of the work was a study in following patterns and finding places in need of tending and mending. Stemming from Entanglement, this work took on a new life once in the space it inhabits. It’s site specificity and relation to the theme of the show gave it a second life. This series of work is modular and morphological in nature so I envision yet another life for synapses when taken down.

2018

Handblown glass lenses mounted on UV filter attachments and their ensuing images.

What do we filter our reality through and what circumstances alter our focus and/or distortion of reality? The answers are complicated and convoluted, especially now. The function of these lenses, the “Climatic Distortionists,” is to simultaneously focus and distort images in order to convey the emotional and psychological states we find ourselves in when trying to grapple with the realities of a world held hostage by climate change. We live in an age of global crisis where it is often difficult to pinpoint the sources of our personal and collective frustrations and anxieties. Global warming induced climate change is a “hyperobject”—a term coined by the philosopher, Timothy Morton, as that which we can never fully grasp because we are within it, and because it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. When I attach these lenses to my digital camera, I often leave the auto focus on just to see what will happen. My camera does not like this, and it struggles to find a focal point, often finding focus in unlikely spaces. I find this to be a poignant metaphor for our current struggles living within climate change—it is increasing difficult to navigate and focus within this global crisis of uncertainty. Attaching these ‘analog’ lenses to a digital camera and then further manipulating the images through an inversion to their negative state creates images that are alien and apocalyptic. I photograph interstitial spaces where ocean, land, and sky converge but the lenses skew the imagery just enough to leave the viewer wondering what it is, exactly, that they are looking at and solicits a focus on multiple points at once. In the cases where I invert the images to their negative state, they are rendered as liminal in space, and subliminally conjure alternative realities as light becomes dark, sky and ocean resemble deserts, and land becomes fluid/gaseous/crystalline.

2018

Digital photograph through glass, printed on plain paper, washed, waxed, scanned and reprinted on acetate.

The idea of distortion and degradation of an image is of interest to me because we exist in an age of image as detritus. How far can you push an image before its meaning is lost? How long does an image last in one state of being?

2015

Kiln-formed glass, archival thread, LED armatures, monofilament

10’ x 20’ x 50’

REFUSALON GALLERY. San Francisco, CA

The gallery space is an old basement storage in San Francisco’s Chinatown that must be entered through doors in the sidewalk. The front gallery looks a lot like what a gallery usually looks like. Then you walk through a cleared storage area to encounter darkness and a few stairs leading up to a brick walled, low ceiling room. It take a minute for one’s eyes to adjust. Due to the low ceilings, the viewer is met, almost face to face with some of the glass pieces as they wander through, toggling their focus between the glass and the shadows. The shadows become as much, if not more of the installation as the physical elements.

2015

Kiln-formed glass, thread, monofilament

Variable dimensions

PUBLIC GLASS GALLERY. San Francisco, CA

This gallery space is near an open bay door that allows for variable light and air movement throughout the day. For this reason, the work was ever-changing—sometimes almost still with barely a shadow, sometimes dancing in the air and on the walls.

2014

Laminated plywood, eye hooks, monofilament

Variable dimensions

THE COMPOUND GALLERY. Oakland, CA

This installation was inspired by the lower canyons of Tent Rocks, New Mexico. The way one weaves through the carved canyons is such that you only get visual edges and slivers at one time.

2013

Found over-sized blueprint folders, wax, grommets, tack nails

12’ x 16’ x 2.5’

PUBLIC GLASS GALLERY. San Francisco, CA

The repetition of coating these folders with a blended wax rendered the paper translucent and silky to the touch. As the the days of the installation period progressed, the folders opened more with gravity and warmth from the lights giving the work a living quality.

2009

Reclaimed building materials: 2x4 wood, sheetrock, house paint, driveway concrete

6’ x 16’ x 4’

WORTH RYDER GALLERY. Berkeley, CA

The gallery space this installation inhabited has two entrances that allow viewers to pass through. This work cut off the ability for viewers to pass through, mimicking the way our built environment often cuts off the migratory passages and patterns of animal and plant species in the natural world. Utilizing reclaimed building materials to mimic a mountain pass foments the meaning.