A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Anthony Park Kascak, a person with light skin tone and dark hair, standing against a wall full of pictures of ceramics and sculptures.

On This Page

Anthony Park Kascak

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Anthony Park Kascak (he/him) is a first generation Korean-American with a BFA in Art Practices and BA in Psychology from the University of Colorado Boulder, and an MFA from the University of Arkansas. He has attended residencies and exhibited work in Germany, China, South Korea, and around the United States. 

Publications

Yoon-Ramirez, I. (2021). Walking-Sensing as a decolonial art and pedagogical practice. International Journal of Education through Art, 17(1), 115-133.

Personal Statement

At the core of my studio practice I explore hwa 화 and its connection to my disorientation of cultural hybridity. In Korean, hwa has a multitude of meanings ranging from flower, fire, anger, growing, or becoming. Growing up I played hwatu (화투, flower cards) with my mother to divine our fortune regarding love, money, or who would visit. As soon as she finished reading our fortune that predicted a visit from a guest, the doorbell would ring. Despite these magical moments, my mother rejected her Korean identity in favor of adopting a more Americanized life. In an effort to work through cultural assimilation, I reimagine the context of hwa and hwatu through a lens of personal narrative—drawing from experiences of my upbringing, queerness, intimate relationships, and research of Korean history and reconstructing them into painted and relief-carved ceramic tiles and objects. 

Work

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Historically understood as the ecstatic experience of religious consciousness, mysticism has grown to encompass all visionary human experience and the pursuit of ¿ultimate truth¿. We will travel down several veins of this rhizomatic structure in the hopes of understanding its complex form. This course combines two modalities: extensive studio time and reading/discussion of mystical, esoteric, and occult texts. Emphasis will be on ceramic hand building, process, and conceptual exploration. Some of the topics and figures discussed will be mystery, magic, paganism, surrealism and dreams, folk horror, denkbild, parapolitics, pre-Columbian relics, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Louise Bourgeois, Rene Magritte, Huma Bhabha, Arlene Shechet and others. You can expect to produce a body of work consisting of assigned and self-directed projects to be presented in a culminating midterm and final critique.

Class Number

1351

Credits

3

Description

In this studio and theory based class, we will explore the possibilities of low-fire ceramics and will consider how a ceramic studio is positioned within a local, regional, national, and global material culture. We will seek to understand and build relationships with common ceramics materials with the intention to gain an intuitive understanding how to best use them to create clay bodies and dynamic surfaces at a low-fire range. Students will work together to create and organize a communal database of materials and their properties, with the information gathered culminating into a research book published at the end of the course. We will consider firings in both oxidation and reduction, as well as alternative firing methods such as saggar and pit-firing.

Class Number

1362

Credits

3