Katie Kozak
Artist in Residency, September 2022
Katie Kozak is an queer artist of Métis and Ukrainian settler descent. She grew up in Denare Beach, Saskatchewan, and her ancestral roots are in the Métis communities of St. François Xavier, and Boggy Creek, Manitoba.
Her visual art practice is centered around connectivity to land, relationship, ritual and traces. She begins her process by spending contemplative time in nature, with other living beings. Being with the forest and near water remind her of her father, she has become aware that her values for making and being are deeply tied to him, processing his loss, and reforming connections to family and identity.
She believes the body is a vessel of imprinted knowledge of experience, even when unacknowledged. Through ritual and deepening connection to the land she has experienced the body’s ability to translate that knowledge when it’s been needed.
Untitled
This piece was co-created with Reed Jackson, and was crafted to offer participants the opportunity to embody the temporality of another being. The piece is speculative of what a water molecule witnesses or experiences as it moves through the water cycle, starting and ending its journey in the ground.
This cyclical nature was chosen as a way to attempt to enact care for the participants that come to listen.
“Sound as a medium is very vibrationally embodying, which is the reason I became deeply interested in it, and trying to understand why our time in the forest feels so good.” - Katie Kozak