Artist Talk: Katie Shapiro & Virginia Arce
Join us Saturday, October 24 at 11:00 am for a conversation with the artist.
Artists Katie Shapiro and Virgina Arce will discuss influences that have shaped her new work including Jungian psychology, autobiography, geology, memory, and matter.
About the Artists
Virginia Arce is a curator, writer, and arts advocate. Her curatorial practice centers emerging contemporary artists and has spanned artist-run, municipal, nonprofit, and academic spaces. She is a co-founder and co-editor of The Invisible Archive, and in 2024, was named Emerging Arts Leader by ArtsOC. She earned her MFA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of California, Irvine.
Katie Shapiro’s (b. 1983, Los Angeles, CA) practice explores the ineffable—making visible what cannot be seen. Her most recent work reflects her ongoing investigation into perception, presence, and what lies beyond view. The artist writes:
“Through my work, I aim to create evocative, multi-layered pieces that reflect the complexity of human existence across personal, historical, and cosmic dimensions. I combine my photographic practice with sculptural elements, blurring the lines between image and object, surface and structure. This material expansion allows me to craft immersive environments that challenge conventional boundaries and invite a more tactile, spatial engagement with visual media.
Sculpture, for me, is not simply about form—it is a way of embodying the unseen. By integrating photography with physical materials such as wood, obsidian, and mirrors, I explore how material presence can hold and transmit intangible states: memory, emotion, energy, and psychological depth. The works often draw from natural topographies—energy vortices, impact craters, high mountain elevations—which act as metaphors for the internal landscapes we all carry. These geologic markers mirror our own transformations, holding space for rupture, resilience, and rebirth.
Motherhood has profoundly shaped my artistic inquiry. It has attuned me more acutely to the liminal, intuitive, and cyclical aspects of life—the quiet, often unseen labor of care and creation. As both a personal and archetypal experience, motherhood introduces an expanded awareness of time, space, and bodily knowledge. It offers a lived experience of duality: being both self and other, grounded and dissolving, nurturing and fiercely protective. This duality echoes in my work, where form and image coalesce to explore the unconscious currents that flow beneath everyday reality.”