Kara Springer holds degrees from the University of Toronto, ENSCI les Ateliers in Paris, and the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of the Bahamas, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Frankfurt Museum of Applied Arts. She is an alum of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and currently holds a fellowship with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Program.
March 6, 2020 – April 2, 2020
Round 13: Hold by Toronto-based artist Kara Springer. Their installation began with a photo she took eight years ago in Elmina Castle in Ghana, a site in which captured individuals were held before being forced to cross the Atlantic into chattel slavery in the Americas. Springer came across the image on a hard drive in the weeks before moving to Houston, Texas last year with her one-year-old daughter. The image is suspended within a light-box hanging from the top of the cage. A set of floating stairs face the light-box repeating the form of the staircase featured in the photograph.
Kara Springer’s interdisciplinary practice is particularly concerned with armature—the underlying structure that holds the flesh of a body in place. She utilizes photography, sculpture, and site-specific interventions to explore precarity and brokenness in systems of structural support through engagement with architecture, urban infrastructure, and systems of institutional and political power. Springer has lived, worked, and studied in Toronto, Paris, Philadelphia, and New York, where she recently completed the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Springer is currently a fellow at the Core Program in Houston, Texas.
Listen to Kara Springer in conversation with Cage Match Curator Aryel Rene Jackson below. Explore our other podcast episodes here
