Artist Statement

Tasha Determan’s art revolves around juxtapositions, recontextualizations, transformations, and interactions. Through the series she presents to the viewer, it is important that the audience understands the context and experiences the artwork. Additionally, the materiality of a work of art comes second to the audience. It is often through the material and the use of the material that the statement is formed. As a sculptor, she has not settled on any specific art process or medium. Though, she is involved in metal casting, specifically, cast iron. She explores a variety of mediums and derives meaning through the materials and symbols. Her work emphasizes process heavy, research-based, and intuition lead artworks. Through her transformations, she offers new perspectives to challenge the viewer.

Her most recent solo exhibition featured her Iron Age series, which is both conceptual and technical research. The series is an exploration within the current indifference of war and issues of gun control. It poses conversations about the duality of weapons as toys and vice versa through the transformation of objects. The triviality of toys as adults and the current unimportance of war from the perspective of the United States goes hand in hand. On a technical level, her research encompasses the techniques she utilized to make resin bonded sand molds and ceramic shell molds of actual, air-filled balloons. 

She is currently developing a series of work for her honors thesis and BFA show about female nudity, censorship, and the separation between naked and nude. 

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Biography

Tasha Determan is a current undergraduate student at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, South Dakota. She is pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Sculpture and an Art History minor. She originally grew up on a poultry farm near Emery, South Dakota. She was initially introduced and mentored within art in high school through David Cantrell. Her education of past and current artists inspired her to become an artist as well. She has been closely mentored by Christopher Meyer through her education at the University of South Dakota. Moreover, she plans to further her artistic education with a Master of Fine Arts in the coming future. She has been involved in the iron casting community for three years and has attended twenty iron pour events and conferences.