Ashwini Bhat: Reverberating Self

The first mid-career survey of the artist’s work, Ashwini Bhat: Reverberating Self contains artworks made over the past decade alongside newly made work that has never been shown. The exhibition illustrates her journey since moving to California—creating a new home and securing a sense of belonging through communion with her environment and art making.

The artworks evidence Bhat’s technical skill and intuitive approach to diverse materials and techniques, including cast bronze, hand-built ceramics, video works, and an artist-led collaborative community installation. All works on view are part of Assembling California, the artist’s ongoing project of place and self. The series concentrates on natural phenomena including post-fire forests, climate change, large-scale forces, mapping, and relationships.

As an immigrant from southern India, Bhat works to find a sense of belonging and self in her home in California. She does this through walking, hiking, and spending time with local ecologists. Bhat’s past is infused into the present and imaginings of possible futures. She weaves time and experience through her sculptures by naming a body of her works depicting California flora after nature spirits, or Yakshis, entities that are part of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious practices.

Bhat firmly roots her practice in recognizing humankind’s interconnectedness with all living beings and places—through contact, communion, and witnessing. She creates sculptures to share moments of her journey—of seeking self within her ecologies and invites viewers to relate to their environments by building relationships and spending time with other beings, human and nonhuman alike.