A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

Anthony Park Kascak

Lecturer

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

This class is an introduction to clay and technology unique to ceramics. This class is recommended for first year students. In this class we will begin to bring technology and clay together. This class will give you the fundamentals to continue your investigations into printing with clay. There is no required experience in 3d modeling to take this course. In this class objects will be created using Rhino from its commands such as Repeat, Rotation, Spin, Revolve, Round, Unroll, Unfold, Open, Line.. These pieces created virtually will be translated to reality via the Potterbot at SAIC in the Ceramics department. We will also look at rudimentary ways that we can be inventive and mimic the 3d printer at home with basic materials to create objects. We will look at artists working both in traditional and non-traditional methods. Discussion about the virtual and physical space will be a topic that will be discussed and how to negotiate that space as an artist. Artists will include but are not limited to: Tom Lauerman, Michael Eden, Stacy Jo Scott, Brian Boldon, Oliver Van Herpt, Slip Rabbit Studio, UNFOLD, Jonathan Keep. We will have weekly reading and articles covering topics related to ceramics and the digital, the history of the vessel and how the digital is seen in the contemporary art and design arena. Specific authors may be Jenni Sorkin, Okakura Kakuzo and Edmund de Waal.

Class Number

1188

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

1195

Credits

3