Kara Uzelman

To Fall in Hell or Soar Angelic podcast: goo.gl/I5EtmS

Kara Uzelman (b. in Vancouver, 1978) is a Canadian artist, who lives and works in the small, rural, farming community of Nokomis, Saskatchewan. Interested in the radical potential of handmade culture, Uzelman’s work engages with the processes of gathering, making and inventing as a kind of self-directed study of her surrounding environments. Her sculptures, collections and archives activate the narrative potential of objects and explore the immaterial qualities of the material world, referencing folk techniques, her surrounding environment (from where she sources her materials), field trips, internet research and peripheral fields of scientific study. Often using wood, earth, paper, rope, outmoded electronic devices, and household remnants, her provisional constellations of gleaned objects and information work to disrupt perceptions of value and create alternate systems, cycles and networks.

Uzelman's works for 67 steps continue to follow the artist’s interest in the local history and folklore surrounding medical research involving LSD and other hallucinogenic substances conducted in the fifties and sixties near her home in rural Saskatchewan. Beginning with a socialist government’s effort to realize a newly envisioned model for Universal Health Care, Uzelman follows this line of inquiry to an abandoned brick plant at Claybank Saskatchewan, the material source for bricks used to build many of the community hospitals, as well as the Weyburn Hospital where much of the hallucinogenic research and studies were conducted. Inspired by a summer fieldtrip to Claybank, the works in, Where the Necessary Instruments Do Not Exist, the Thoughts in Question Are Not Expressed and Not Even Conceived, feature two large-scale photographs and a sculptural installation (made from wood and unfired clay) and reflect on history, memory, place, the influence of tools and technology on our perceptions of and interactions with our surrounding environment.

Accompanying these works, the podcast ‘To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic’ explores the coining of the term ‘psychedelic’. Starting with the historical correspondence between writer Aldous Huxley based out of Los Angeles (CA) and psychologist Humphry Osmond, based in Regina (SK), Uzelman delves into some of the lesser-known local (Saskatchewan) history around the coining of this culturally significant term.

Since graduating from Emily Carr University in 2004, Uzelman has presented her sculpture and site-specific installations in group and solo exhibitions including those at The Power Plant, Toronto; Le Commissariat, Paris; Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin; and Mercer Union, Toronto. She has participated in residencies at The Klondike Institute of Art, Dawson City; Triangle, Marseille, France; and Mains D’oeuvres, Paris.