Kaori Freda is a multimedia artist and recent graduate from Reed College in Portland, OR. She is the recipient of the Portland Art Museum Mad Paw Grant, the Reed College President’s Winter International Fellowship and Initiative Grant, and recently exhibited in the Blackfish Gallery in Portland. She has shown in various galleries in Washington and Oregon. Kaori was on the outreach committee of the North Bank Artist Gallery in Vancouver, WA, and worked with a local art high school to organize an ongoing internship program. She has worked in a contemporary art gallery in Florence, Italy, and has interned at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Her work contends with issues of religious grounds, the effect of memory upon spatial relations, and tends to lean towards illustrative design or mediums including casting processes, humorous sculpture, and assemblages.
For her last project, Kaori traveled to Seoul, Korea under the auspices of a college funded travel fellowship and a research grant to a cult's holy shrine. There, she made rubbings and video-documented daily rituals which the pious carry out to ensure the purity of their lineage and passage into paradise. The documentation she brought back informed an immersive site-specific installation that filled an entire studio space. The installation was comprised of 23,000 cones, a silken waterfall, and a series of silk scrolls rendered with ink and encased in plexiglass.
Kaori lives and works in Saitama, Japan.
