Katie Hovencamp
Mediums: Sculpture/Mixed Media
Studio: 254
Katie Hovencamp began her professional studies at the Baum School of Art in Allentown, PA and received her BFA from Arizona State University in 2009 and her MFA from the Pennsylvania State University in 2014. Hovencamp has exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions within the United States, The United Kingdom, and Latvia. Her work has been reviewed in the Chicago Reader and several online and print publications. She was the recipient of the Outstanding Student Achievement Award for Contemporary Sculpture in 2014 and theUniversity Graduate Fellowship at the Pennsylvania State University in 2012. Hovencamp has participated in residency programs at Vermont Studio Center, Serde Interdisciplinary artist group in Latvia, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. In 2016, she was awarded an artist residency with International Sculpture Center at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ. She has taught at various institutions such as the Edna Vihel Center for the Arts, Totts Gap Art Institute, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg Area Community College, and most recently Keystone College.
Artist statement
In my creative work, I fracture cultural constructs such as gender, beauty, and the body politic to expose, examine, and critique their social and historical assumptions. For some time fairy tales and fantasy have inspired my imagination and curiosity about their effects on women’s roles and the construction of their identities. I also create and infiltrate the spaces between the dyad and its effects on gender, perceived beauty, and the body politic.
Assuming the physical body a cultural material, I perform it in ways that offer seeing and thinking about its identity construction differently. Doing so, enables the viewer to experience and empathize with identity politics through my actions, objects, and drawings.
My process of making art emerges from complex and contradictory circumstances, materials, and objects, and their multiple encounters. My live performances and sculptural works often lead to the creation of supplementary drawings, installations, and videos, to constitute a complex body of work. My purpose in doing so is to explore and experiment with ways that various mediums can inform each other and from which new concepts can emerge. Working in this manner enables a perpetual state of alteration and transformation. At the intersections of these various mediums, I am able to create work that infiltrates and disrupts the cultural constructs of gender, beauty and the body politic found in fairy tales and fantasy.
Artist Gallery
