PERFORMATIVE ECOLOGIES
DIALOGUE l
Thursday, September 10
10am PT, 11am MT, 1pm ET
Performative Ecologies opened on June 12 in Santa Fe at CURRENTS 826 Gallery, curated by ecoartspace founder Patricia Watts. Watts has interviewed three artists in the exhibition on Instagram including: Alicia Escott, Cherie Sampson and Mary Mattingly. She also interviewed Bonnie Sherk via SITE Santa Fe in June, and has conducted in depth video interviews with Basia Irland, Fern Shaffer and Dominique Mazeaud for the ecoartspace archive.
For this ZOOM Dialogue, Jenny Kendler, Claudia Bucher, Shana Robbins and Minoosh Zomorodina will discuss their work in Performative Ecologies.
Basia Irland, along with Alicia Escott, Cherie Sampson, and Mary Mattingly, will each respond to the presentations, and a Q&A with the eight artists will be moderated by Watts.
This Zoom will be presented in the style of the webinar format. In order to give all the artists time to speak, the dialogue will run for 1.5 hours. Participants are welcome to use the chat box to discuss the work and converse with each other during the presentations.
Members and one guest are free. General Public can attend for a $10. All participants MUST REGISTER. The Event will be recorded.
Note: there will be an ecofeminism dialogue on October 15 including Performative Ecology artists Fern Shaffer, Dominique Mazeaud and Bonnie Ora Sherk, as well as other ecoartspace members who were early participants in this movement: Betsy Damon and Gilah Yelin Hirsch.
Member Presenters:
Jenny Kendler is an interdisciplinary artist and environmental activist whose work asks us to de-center the human, making space for the radical, transformative otherness of our biodiverse Earth. She received her BFA from MICA in 2002 and her MFA from SAIC in 2006. Kendler has been commissioned to create public projects at urban conservatories, remote deserts and tropical forests. She is Art Coordinator for Extinction Rebellion Chicago, Board Chair of artist residency ACRE, and since 2014 has been the first Artist-in-Residence with environmental non-profit NRDC.
Claudia Bucher creates performative sculptural installations exploring ideas about extended sentience. She operates at the interstices of art, science, technology, architecture, mysticism and science fiction. Bucher is inspired by space exploration, the Mojave Desert, biomimicry, biomorphic design, and DIY culture. Bucher has an MFA from Art Center College of Design and has taught new media at UCLA, Otis College of Art and Brandeis University. In 2019, she was artist-in-residence at the North Dakota Museum of Art’s McCanna House and at Buckwheat Space in Morongo Valley, CA.
Shana Robbins is an Atlanta-based artist who works in performance, film, drawing/painting, video, and installation. Through hybrid personas that arise from her experience of being a fashion model, a Butoh dancer, and a practitioner within transcultural plant medicine healing ceremonies, she is bodying forth ancient instincts and ritualized gestures with the living land. Her work aims to create new cartographies that advance the self as a set of relations; eco ritual as a way of relating with the world; landscape as a cultural mirror; the identity of the in-between.
Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist who makes visible the emotional and psychological reflections of her mind's eye inspired by nature. She recieved her MFA in new genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, and studied graphic design and photography at Azad University in Tehran. She has exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, Pori Art Museum. Zomorodinia has received residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, ACRE, and Djerassi. She's currently Artist in Residence (AIR) at Recology San Francisco.
Basia Irland is an artist and activist who creates international water projects. Her works are featured in the books Water Library and Reading the River: The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland. Irland's ecological works span over four decades working in Africa, Canada, Europe, South America, Southeast Asia, and the US. She provides her viewers with a creative understanding of water while examining how communities of people, plants, and animals rely on this vital element. Irland is Professor Emerita from the University of New Mexico, where she founded the Arts and Ecology Program.
Alicia Escott is an interdisciplinary artist who practices in solidarity with thinkers across fields undoing the construct of “nature” as a thing separated from us and our world. She's interested in how we negotiate our immediate day-to-day responsibilities amid an awareness of the overarching specter of climate change, mass-extinction and the subsequent unspoken experience of loss and heartbreak and longing— and the related social and political unrest it produces. Escott is a founding member of 100 Days Action. She is also half of the Social-Practice Project The Bureau of Linguistical Reality.
Cherie Sampson is as an interdisciplinary artist working in environmental performance, sculpture and video art. She has exhibited internationally in art-in-nature symposia, video/film screenings and exhibitions. Her solo performances in the environment have taken place in the U.S., Finland, Norway, Cuba, Spain, Netherlands and Korea. In 2018, the Pori Museum of Art in Finland acquired photographic and video documentation by Sampson of site-based installations and performances for their permanent collection.
Mary Mattingly is the founder of Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in NYC to circumvent public land laws. She's currently artist-in-residence at the Brooklyn Public Library and has recently launched Public Water, a performance and sculpture about NYC's drinking watershed with More Art. Her work has been exhibited at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Storm King, Brooklyn Museum, and Palais de Tokyo; and featured in Aperture Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, New Yorker, NPR, and Art21.
Click on the button below to go to the online exhibition:
