ROUND 24: Ritualware by Ariana Kimball
Ritualware: Care, Ritual and Keeping Things Alive
Closing Panel with Artist-in-Residence Ariana Kimball and Selected Mentors
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2025 at 6-8 PM CST
Location: Online (link provided via email)
Admission: Free & open to the public • RSVP via with friends link
Format: 60-minute discussion + 20 minute audience Q&A
About the Event
Join us for the closing conversation of “Ritualware”, an exhibition by Austin-based artist Ariana Kimball. Ariana’s installation explores care, routine, and the quiet labor of keeping things alive, both physically and emotionally. Through materials such as hydroponic plants, chia-grown objects, and carved wood forms, her work reflects on ritual as a way of grounding ourselves in cycles of presence and persistence.
This online panel brings Ariana into conversation with a group of invited artists who each had the opportunity to visit her studio during the residency. Together, they’ll reflect on Ariana’s practice and installation, and expand the discussion to larger themes of ritual, care, and spatial storytelling in contemporary art. The conversation will be moderated by Manik Raj Nakra with a brief introduction by Aryel René Jackson.
Cage Match Project (CMP) gallery lives in an industrial caged-trailer. Measured at 20x8x7 feet, this weathered and rusted container resides in a gravel parking lot in Austin, TX where it is under constant exposure to the elements and 24-hour public viewership. By fully embracing the caged-trailer as both literal and conceptual context, Cage Match Project purposefully stages a narrative of the artist-at-odds, with either history, space, or a work of art itself.
Since 2017, through an open call process, with several exhibitions per year, CMP has hosted 21 Rounds of physical installations, 2 seasons of podcasts, 12 workshops all of which are created and led by the community and invited artists and collectives.
The Museum of Human Achievement (MoHA) is a community-driven non-profit organization in Austin, TX grounded in affordability, inclusivity and access for artists. MoHA’s vision is for an empowered, resilient creative community where each member has the resources to foster well being, prosperity, and a self-determined future.
MoHA runs a variety of programs in Community Abundance, Digital Arts, Exhibition, and Professional Development for artists, organizers, and audiences. Learn more at their website https://moha.wiki.
Exhibition Context: Round 24: Ritualware
On view: August 2 – September 6, 2025
Ariana Kimball is an Austin-based artist whose work explores care, routine, and the quiet labor of keeping things alive, both physically and emotionally. Kimball’s work explores the quiet persistence of rituals through materials and sculptural forms. She traces how small, repeated gestures such as cleaning, resetting, and tending, become anchors of meaning and modes of presence.
Round 24: Ritualware brings together both elemental and domestic objects inside the cage. Plants growing in hydroponic cells, chia-covered pillows, and beaded strings are placed along the walls and inside the cage. In the center sits a tree trunk with a mandala motif carved into its diagonal cross-section. The mandala and the 7 pointed star become a visual compass, orienting the cage in relation to the movement of the sun and moon. These materials evoke the cyclical behavior of both humans and of the universe.
The installation draws from Kimball’s concept of “Re- and Pre-Setting,” a practice of returning to care as a continuous act. Her work frames care not as something to complete, but as a state to return to, again and again.
By using natural materials and embracing a domestic aesthetic, Kimball challenges the logic of excess. Her restrained, grounded approach suggests that presence, not accumulation, is the true measure of value, redefining materialism through acts of mindfulness and attention.
Round 24: Ritualware by Ariana Kimball is presented as part of Cage Match Project’s 2025 Input/Output (I/O) Residency, a program dedicated to supporting emerging artists working in installation and spatial storytelling. The next application cycle opens July 7 and closes August 11, 2025, for our Fall 2025 residency beginning in September. The program is open to recent graduates and upper-level undergraduates in Central Texas, with a focus on supporting Queer, BIPOC, gender-nonconforming, and female artists. Learn more and apply through the “Open Calls” tab on our website available in english y en español.