Blog – Art in Odd Places

AiOP Weekly: Meet the AiOP 2018 BODY Artists VI

September 3, 2018 – 11:29 pm

Each week we feature artists from Art in Odd Places 2018: BODY NYC

Autumn Robinson & Lyra Monteiro (The Museum On Site), Washington’s Next!, 2018. Image Credit: Autumn Robinson

Autumn Robinson & Lyra Monteiro (The Museum On Site)
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
Autumn Robinson & Lyra Monteiro (Director of The Museum On Site) are multidisciplinary artists who met as Create Change Fellows with the Laundromat Project. Our project is an expression of our shared interest in racialized bodies in public space, and our backgrounds in history, public performance, media, & political/protest art.
Washington’s Next! responds to President Trump’s tweets following the violence in Charlottesville, one of which read, in part, “Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” Our performance on October 13 will recast George Washington, the seemingly untouchable hero of the Revolution, as the owner of six plantations, and the enslaver of hundreds of people of African descent. This performance will complement our contribution to the group exhibition, a video called The Price of Freedom, which will explore the lineage of slavery in the U.S. and the realities of Black emancipation.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
It allows us to honor those whose bodies have been & continue to be fodder for capitalism, police violence, and white supremacist agendas, even as they are erased from our commemorative landscapes; and to make visible the centrality of these corporeal exploitations to the very foundations of the USA.

Dominique Duroseau, Rap on Race with Rice, (2015- ). Photo Credit: Jason Colbert

Dominique Duroseau
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
I’m an interdisciplinary artist whose works investigate social issues.
Rap on Race with Rice is a participatory performance of discourse about issues on race and racism, while performing the action of separating rice. The performance is inspired by the famous 7.5-hour conversation between James Baldwin (writer & social critic) and Margaret Mead (anthropologist), entitled A Rap on Race, in 1970. The idea behind this performance is to get people to open up and discuss continuing issues of race and racism today, through the repetitive action of separating black and white rice grains.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
The theme Body is heavily present in my works politically, addressed as: BLACK BODIES, BLACK PRESENCE. As a Black Person/Black Woman…my (and other’s) presence alone can be seen as a threat and we can easily become victims. I love to use it as a political weapon to challenge ridiculous fears.

Clarivel Ruiz, Synophrys: And Other Hairy Little Things, 2018. Photo credit: Clarivel Ruiz

Clarivel Ruiz
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
We, daughter of Kiskeya Ayiti Bohio (aka Hispaniola aka Dominican Republic and Haiti), raised in New York City on the ancestral bones and covered shrines of the Lenape people. Our artist practice delves into understanding the historical myths created to oppress people of color in-order to heal wounds created by these racial divides. In 2016 we initiated a project called Dominicans Love Haitians Movement bringing together Dominican and Haitians to celebrate our commonalities. We are part of Culture Push’s Utopian Fellowship. A 2017 cohort of Hemispheric Institute’s EmergeNYC art activist program. Participate in 2016 Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matters performance group for Simon Lee’s gallery exhibit at the New Museum and in 2017, Brooklyn Museum’s closing event We Wanted A Revolution. In 2018, we are part of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative as Associate Artist and Art In Odd Places, Body! exhibit discussing how body hair has impacted women’s consciousness.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
Body to me is the raising of our consciousness and joy, where does it exist inside of my body? It is considering how we have stepped away from the erotic and the tantric to pacify and oblige the White male gaze while subverting our own desires to exist freely and unconstrained.

Jaime Sunwoo, Ear to Ear, 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist

Jaime Sunwoo
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
I am a Korean-American multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, New York. I combine video, audio, sculpture, and storytelling to create sensory performances in galleries, theaters, and public spaces. I often examine food as a way to discuss identity, history, and death. I’m currently working on Specially Processed American Me, a performance and food history workshop series on SPAM in the Asia-Pacific, its influence in World War II, and its place in the Asian American narrative.

For AiOP, I welcome you to join me for Ear to Ear, where we will listen to each other’s inner sounds by pressing our ears together. We’ll take turns eating different textured foods– granola, mochi, and pop rocks– to experience these textures aurally and orally. I’ve found the experience to be simultaneously playful, deeply intimate, and somewhat grotesque. It feels like you’re hearing through another person’s perspective– empathy through listening.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
We show trust and intimacy through the body so with strangers, we guard our senses. We avoid eye contact, are quieter, and certainly do not touch. We need to in order to protect ourselves. Ear to Ear is a celebratory act to share the senses with someone you are willing to trust just for a moment.

Nicole Goodwin, Ain’t I a Woman (?/!), 2017. Photo Credit: Victor Bautista

Nicole Goodwin
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
I am a writer, poet, and performance artist and I am a resident of East Harlem for almost 15 years. My project Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): Kingston Legacy was born out of my ongoing project Ain’t I a Woman (?/!) which came to fruition under the supervision of Ed Woodham and George Emilio Sanchez from The Hemispheric Institute’s EmergeNYC Fellowship cohort for 2017. I developed the project in order to highlight the concept of how our society objectifies the bodies of African-American women, especially those that do not meet the optimal standards of beauty. My work is in conversation with the legendary Sojourner Truth prolific 1851 speech entitled Ain’t I a Woman.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
For me the theme “BODY” incorporates dialogue. So much opposition is set against Black and Brown bodies of color, that do not fit into the mainstream norms of Western beauty standards. My body is subjected to alienation daily. I want my work to give rise to presence outside of these biases.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Mutual Recognition System (Concerning Max Factor), 2018. Photo Credit: Diane Nguyen

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
In the 1930s, Max Factor, Jr., heir to the cosmetic empire, experimented with a new lipstick invention called Tru-Colors. He hired female workers at his New York manufacturing plant to test the indelibility of his new reds through repetitive mouth-to-mouth kissing. When the workers went on mass strike and walked off the job, Factor created a “kissing machine” to automate his experiments. My project enacts this historical paradox.

Writer Clara Lou wrote about my project: “The work of caring is never done; the feminized subjects who often perform this work find themselves doing it over and over. We encountered the intersection of waged work and caring labor, twinned history tearing at what is to come.” The work of caring, especially as it is positioned between the rise of new beauty norms, industrial corporate management, and the agency of women, is what I set out to discover.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
In contemporary society, the body’s main public relationship is one of security, which I derive from the Latin “sine cura” or “without care.” In the era of broadly defined self-care, we would do well to focus on the cultural conditioning of the body—how others “care” about our bodies.

TANGA, Modular Float, 2018. Photo Credit: Alfredo Travieso

TANGA!: Rachel Chick, Andrew Prieto, Alfredo Travieso
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
As a trans-disciplinary collaborative, we work not across disciplines but through them. Each participant who interacts, even bystanders or passers by, are becoming part of the body of each event. As such, the body actualizes a site for transforming, mutating, and changing where ideas go viral and stability is called into question. This can be social, political, simply aesthetic or eventually spiritual.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
Who’s body, what body?
Everybody
A body of water, a body of land
Auto body
You’re nobody ’till somebody loves you
All bodies are incapable of fragmentation though the term suggests otherwise
The body is the opposite of freedom
Young body, old body, eternal, reproducible.

Dakota Gearhart, Untangling Myself From The Mess Culture Has Made, 2018

Dakota Gearhart
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
I make performance, video, sculpture, collage, & multimedia installations. I use found materials I collect at places like microbiology labs, spam folders, and industrial dumps. Reorganized according to science-fiction & anti-commercial aesthetics, these materials function to depict what the collapse of a (patriarchal and binary) human-centric world view might look like. With this intention, I bundle together my interests in perception, biology, queerness, the role of care and intimacy, humor, and the importance of world-building to articulate more creative & less oppressive futures.

My AiOP project is titled: Untangling Myself From The Mess Culture Has Made. It’s a performance in which I wear 100 intestinal-like cords made from electrical wire and confetti. In this work, my body is my own. It exists for me “to tangle and untangle” with whatever & whoever I want. Through this lens, my body is beautiful, because it’s mine; even if it’s loose, primordial, messy, soft, hard, & coming apart.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
-how my body as a woman is hardly ever my own…it’s always warped by someone else’s desires (sex), biological needs (babies), money (advertising), politics (abortion)-

-how the body starts to come apart at a certain atmospheric pressure-

-how I want agency for my body; let it take up space—————————-

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AiOP Weekly: Meet the AiOP 2018 BODY Artists V

August 27, 2018 – 5:02 pm

Each week we feature artists from Art in Odd Places 2018: BODY NYC.

Rose Nestler, Gymnasia Hysteria Details of Amphora, 2018, Photo Credit: Kim Hoeckele

Rose Nestler
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
Rose Nestler is a NY based interdisciplinary artist focusing in sculpture and video.

The central object of this project is a giant soft vessel made out of fabric commonly used for athletic wear. It is modeled after Greek Amphorae given to athletes as reward for winning sporting events in the Panathenaic games.

Through video, sculpture and performance, Gymnasia Hysteria presents an investigation into the correlation between athleticism, spirituality and patriarchy. Drawing its aesthetic inspiration from the ancient Greco-Roman gymnasia, this work illustrates sports, ceremonies and rewards that sustain the oppressive regime of masculinity within American culture. Although sports culture can stem from and breed toxic masculinity, exercise and team sports, are capable of moving beyond gender, fostering experiences where those who are objectified can achieve momentary transcendence.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
As a child, I went through open heart surgery. One of my first memories involved lying on a bench and “stitching” my own body up with string. I noticed that this early memory was informing my practice. The point of departure for my artistic interests are the delicacy and imperfections of bodies.

Daniela Kostova (in collaboration with Miryana Todorova), Monuments of Incomplete Transition, 2010. Photo Credit: Steve deSeve.

Daniela Kostova
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
I am an interdisciplinary artist, interested in hybrid cultures and architecture that emerge from conditions of global change and migrations. My personal narrative and background informs all of my work. It engages specific sites and communities, and often include participatory elements.

At AiOP I am presenting Monuments of incomplete Transition, conceived in 2010 in collaboration with Miryana Todorova and performed on the streets of NYC. It involves eight large-format vinyl prints (based on photographs of building structures from Bulgaria) that take the form of mobile booths when put together. The printed, full-scale images of these structures are mounted on poles and so could be easily taken down and put up again referencing nomadic practices.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
MIT represents bodies/spaces in transition and a type of architecture, which would be impossible without cooperation. The temporary structures form shared space that is intended for and supported by bodies. Foreign bodies themselves that are extension of my own body, both concealing and revealing.

Kat Cope, I love you. You love me: helmet, 2016. Photo Credit: David Chosid

DON’T MOVE: Kat Cope, Kelly Savage, Kate Frazer Rego
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
The title of our piece, Don’t Move, inherently lends itself to our bodies disrupting NYC’s pedestrian flow. There are these unspoken rules of patterned movement throughout the city riddled with micro-aggressions where women are lower on the hierarchical claim to space, often moving out of the way of men to give way. With Don’t Move, we claim space as well as demand our bodies be both a spectacle and a physical presence that requires deeper consideration.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
The word body often evokes the image of a human but it also refers to a collection. NYC feels like a body in of itself; a metaphorical conglomerate of nerves, tissue and flesh constantly morphing and moving while remaining a still island.

Jody Oberfelder Projects, Madame Ovary, 2018. Photo Credit: Jody Oberfelder. Pictured: Maya Orchin

Jody Oberfelder
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
Madame Ovary is a performance for an audience of one, a place to contemplate how one’s body is a site for agency, intuition, and birth. How has this region that defines a woman and produces life also be construed as a limiting space, reducing gender identity to genitalia? Oberfelder’s film “Duet” made when she was 8 months pregnant will be displayed in the Westbeth gallery, accompanied by index cards with specific body related questions, charting the viewer’s response.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
As a dancer, as a mother, as a woman, as a human being, the body is everything. The body is also an encasement that defines the way we function in the world, how we are perceived, how we travel, how we make imprints in history.

Legacy Fatale, Unbound Feminisms and Territorialities, 2016. Photo credit: Ivy Blackshire

LEGACY FATALE
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
Legacy Fatale is an on-going project celebrating female empowerment through our performance art collective and interdisciplinary social practices. For AiOP/BODY, director Coco Dolle has chosen to cross-over the world of punk with the politics of resistance. In spirit of the Suffragettes movement, we present ‘Tug of War at Beauty Bar.’ Beauty Bar is one of the last remaining staples of East Village culture resisting gentrification. Legacy Fatale invites the audience to a choreographed protest/war game happening outside the Beauty Bar, that will move indoors to an abstract performance, a signature movement of Legacy Fatale, followed by a musical act: ‘What Would Tilda Swinton Do.’

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
BODY is a territory for activating social awareness and changing paradigms.

Luiza Kurzyna, Kiss My Face, 2018. Photo credit: Alex Buly

Luiza Kurzyna
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
I approach creating art as a form of therapy and play. I like to observe my surroundings and complex relationships within it. These visual memories of the natural world mix with a self reflective process from which I create objects to be played or performed with. These often become wearable costumes or puppets with a specific function that’s driven by a desire or critical impulse. In the case of You Are What You Eat, I intend to alter how my body is perceived publicly, by donning a bodysuit with exaggerated breasts resembling sausages, stuffed with “consumables.” To me, the project is a humorous and critical reflection of what I’ve felt like in the recent political/societal landscape and the emotional toll by what we consume on a regular basis, not just through food but also through the news, sexism, and consumer culture. Through the context of playful absurdity and vulnerability, I hope to bring the intimate and personal into the public space.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
The Body is contradictory. It’s full of other bodies and yet one’s own. It’s defined separately from the mind or spirit and yet it’s equated to the full being. Depending on perspectives and prejudices, the external can be beautiful or grotesque. It affects how we live, function and coexist.

x senn-yuen rance, Dissociation Station in Need of Translation, 2018. Photo Credit: Monika Rostvold

x senn-yuen rance
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
x senn-yuen rance is a queer, trans artist of color from Miami, Florida. Their interdisciplinary works engage with mental health, trauma, gender identity, and their hypersexualized and racialized body. “The Cleanse” is an ongoing life/art project that includes mania, depression, hospitalization, documentation, and recovery. “The Cleanse” is a performance; “The Cleanse” is their life. This is the journey and continuation of the artist’s detox from colonization and the white supremacy that has dictated, controlled, manipulated, and infected their mind, body, and spirit. This iteration of “The Cleanse” explores the perceptions, assumptions, and impositions of/on the artist’s body; blurring the lines of what is expected and what is natural.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
body means vessel. as an interdisciplinary performance artist and dancer of multi-marginalized identity, my body is always being used, shamed, or manipulated. in my work, i think of my body as the ultimate vessel in an attempt to salvage and reclaim the bits of me that are authentic and true.

Treizman/Brazil, Off the Grid-iron (Prototypes), 2018. Photo Credit: Adam Brazil

Denise Treizman and Adam Brazil
1. Tell us about yourself and your project for AiOP BODY 2018:
“Off the Grid-iron” is a collaborative project between artists Denise Treizman and Adam Brazil. Denise Treizman is an artist from Chile, currently based in New York. Her sculpture and installation repurposes found and ready-made objects, combined with clay and fiber elements. Her process embraces chance, explores material and spatial relationships and relies on resourcefulness. Adam Brazil is an interdisciplinary artist and professor at Syracuse University. His work approaches social issues with dark humor and material experimentation. He is currently preparing works for his first solo exhibition in NYC at MEN gallery in the Lower East Side.

2. What does the theme BODY mean to you?
Our project comments on notions of gender, exclusivity and the body. Vibrantly glazed footballs function as vessels of energy to be passed down the street until they reach the end zone, where a performer will smash them, shattering preconceived interpretations of sport.

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