Contact: noelkassewitz@gmail.com

ARTIST STATEMENT

Through painting, sculpture, installation and performance, I explore the story of human creation and survival across time. My research into global mythologies and art historical canon, understands various objects, artworks, and artifacts we’ve made to be fragmentary vessels of our collective identity. Surviving wars, neglect, iconoclasm, and mother nature; from all these echoes of events over time, our portrait emerges.

Often depicting weathered or broken objects in distorted surroundings, I see these cultural goods as metaphorical stand-ins for the human condition—beautiful, fragile, flawed, and deceptive. They prompt existential questions about what borrowed ideas we knowingly or unknowingly use in sculpting our future worlds, even as they themselves fight to stay afloat in the rapid flow of time. 

Drawing upon my ocean-based upbringing and background in art conservation, the studio becomes part-wistful shrine, part-research and development lab as I continuously adapt and augment my works for these future worlds, building their resiliency and, by extension, my own. I approach painting first in a Frankenthaler-esque method, flooding canvas with paint. This loose, pre-dying process is somewhat cosmic, setting a vast backdrop with enough depth to hold the highly detailed objects in the foreground. This creation process is reflective of my research methodology, focusing first on broad archetypal narratives, before honing in on specific works of art and moments in time.

Working between the traditional materials of painting and sculpture, and experimental modes of installation and performance, my approach erodes the boundaries between each. I  tether my paintings to automated pulleys and winches that respond to live environmental data; sculptures are video-mapped with projections of paradise; and yet other works are installed in wavering landscapes (swamps, oceans, estuaries) to provoke conversations about the adaptations we must embrace for survival.

My works serve as a cautionary mirror, themselves an echo of an echo, as I reinterpret these ancient narratives for a contemporary audience. The destabilizing speed of change (through future-present phenomena such as AI, space travel, and a climate crisis) will force us to be nimble voyagers. In examining the baggage of the past, we will need to shed old beliefs that no longer serve us, while holding on to those whose anchorage in time is both backwards and forwards facing; in that spirit, I believe we must question and celebrate the objects we’ve made and how they have in turn made us.

BIO

Noël Kassewitz (b.1990, Miami) is a contemporary artist and third-generation Floridian based in Washington, D.C. After receiving her BFA from the University of Florida, she worked with the Rubell Museum and later, living abroad, completed an artist residency in Carrara, Italy with marble master sculptor Boutros Romhein. In addition to her studio practice, she currently works in sculpture conservation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

Kassewitz has given an artist talk at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, is a three-time recipient of the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities’ Visual Artist Fellowship Grant, and was recently named an inaugural Environmental Justice ‘Artivist’ Fellow with Social Arts & Culture + Aspen Institute (2024). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Center on Governors Island (summer 2022) and at Vermont Studio Center through the VSC/Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (autumn 2022).

Her work is held in various private collections as well the public art collections of the District of Columbia, the University of Maryland, and the University of Florida and the corporate collections of MindTree and Outerknown.