Kasia Ozga uses textiles to evoke the human body as well as unseen labor in industrial and domestic contexts, highlighting interactions between value and waste, power and protest. Through soft sculpture and metal casting, Ozga reflects on how class-based and collective identities can both empower and oppress individuals.
Labor/Movement explores the aesthetics of textile workwear and industrial production by engaging with the history of welfare capitalism, mill villages, and the body in blue collar labor. Clothing can symbolize discipline, evoking ideas of presence (stretch out), experiences of time (clocking in) and changing labor practices (offshoring, outsourcing).
Specific artworks in the Goggleworks exhibition take apart and recombine worn anonymous uniforms to produce hybrid objects that ask all of us who is laboring now, why and in what conditions? Individual pieces in the show are sewn and cast from locally-sourced used work-wear (overalls, collared shirts, work uniforms, jackets, slacks) found in former manufacturing regions in France (where the artist lived for 16 years) and in the US. In flat and undulating geometric surfaces, unrelated articles of clothing are cut and recombined to form an endless sea of cloth, revealing the greater whole produced from individual contributions on the assembly line and in the factory.
The site-inspired exhibition emphasizes relationships between the past and the present and pays tribute to the rich history of the GoggleWorks complex, a historic 19th century hub for the manufacturing of glass lenses and, later, personal protective equipment.
Ozga reasserts the value of waste with the aim of bearing witness to an environmental and social reality. By removing fragments of everyday life out of their initial context and selecting, collecting, and transforming such materials, she creates metaphors for bodies absent from decision-making processes and asserts the value of physical manual labor in an increasingly digitized dematerialized world.
Kasia Ozga is the recipient of the 2023 Exhibition Award granted from GoggleWorks’ 15th Annual Juried Art Exhibition.
