Working between sculpture, writing, curating and organizing, I’m interested in the ways that we are directed towards traditional pathways and how we reorient ourselves to navigate often uncharted ways of being in order to find spaces that allow for authenticity. Often using the complicated phenomenological space of the dining table, I locate personal and shared ghosts of a classist European and American East Coast system of etiquette, citing its nuances, histories and multi-faceted failures. In order to swim through the nuances and multi-faceted failures of etiquette, my work enlists collapse, ephemerality, and active material change and transformation to find poetic spaces that consider care and interdependency, community, abundance, flamboyance, death, and on occasion, a bit of magic.
kathrynrauth at gmail.com
Kitty Rauth (b. 1992, New Jersey) is an artist and organizer based in Chicago, IL. Drawing from personal and global histories of systems of etiquette, their work finds poetic spaces that consider care and interdependency, class structure, excess, abundance, and death. She has exhibited nationally, including Roots & Culture (CHI), Westbeth Artists Housing (NYC), LVL3 (CHI), SPRING/BREAK (NYC), and Brewhouse Association (PGH), among others. In 2024, she was selected for Newcity’s Art 50: Chicago’s Art World Vanguard. Rauth graduated with their BFA from Arcadia University in Glenside, PA and their MFA in Studio Art from the Sculpture Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Comfort Station, a multidisciplinary art space in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, and as a Lecturer in Contemporary Practices at SAIC.
