kanarinka (Catherine D'Ignazio)
Waltham, MA
artist / educator
kanarinka, a.k.a. Catherine D’Ignazio, is an artist and educator. Her art practice is interdisciplinary, and often distributed across various sites, physical and virtual. She states, “I am invested in the idea that small actions can have poetic, transformative resonance.” kanarinka focuses on the humorous, imaginative gesture – on taking a performative leap to research something in the real world. How many breaths does it take to evacuate Boston? What would the city of Cambridge be like if all its public places were renhamed? What do the spaces between our word sound like? What does the weather on my body look like? How can you measure fear? kanarinka stages encounters between different audiences as a research strategy to answer these questions. The encounters may be small, but they resonae together in the archives generated by the project. These archives take the form of performances, sculptures, websites, books, maps, audio CDs or videos. Each project reinforces the (perhaps romantic, perhaps true) notion that a small, imaginative gesture offers alternative political and aesthetic ways of being together.
This bio/description was originally published in 2010 and updated in 2013. For more current information, please refer to the award recipient's website (if provided).