Chris Paxton

Artist Statement

As an artist my work begins with the culinary, often in the form of dining experiences that push beyond the dish on the table and expand into sound, video, installation and happenings to create an immersive sensory experience. These communal and collaborative meals are a medium through which to nourish dreams, collective desires and more-than-human worlds. My cooking is rooted in a deep connection with cyclical time and the specificities of place, making use of local and seasonal produce as well as foraged foods whenever possible. A shared meal is a dream we shape together, a collective desire where multiple realities each take their place at the table.

Red plum, sake & shiso sorbet. Served as part of the menu for a Lucky You Studios pop-up at Dotori in Berlin

Bio

Chris Paxton is a culinary artist based in Berlin, Germany. He is the host of Dreams, a seasonal artist dinner-listening event hosted at Kwia, a queer listening space in Berlin. He is also a co-founder of Lucky You Studios, a culinary creative studio hosting unique dining experiences for a variety of clients from the creative fields such as Highsnobiety, Woolrich, Timberland, Berlin Club Commission and Resident Advisor. In 2023, he was invited as chef-in-residence for Nuova Atlantide, an artist residency on movement, language and landscape in Bomarzo, Italy. His work was recently published in the print publication Planetary Embodiments: Cooking with Words for Systemic Change and Solidarity. The speculative work “Recipes in Ruins", a collaboration with artist Maia Magoga, is a collection of magical recipes using weeds as the main ingredients, weaving together dreams for the future with grief for a lost home among post-capitalist ruins. The work will be featured in the forthcoming edition of the magazine Plant Magic on the topic of weeds. His forthcoming work will be shown in January 2024 at the Shedhalle in Zürich as part of the exhibition program for Protozone 13.

David Rakowski

Bio

David Rakowski grew up in St. Albans, Vermont and studied at New England Conservatory, Princeton, and Tanglewood, where his teachers were Robert Ceely, John Heiss, Milton Babbitt, Paul Lansky, and Luciano Berio. He has received a large number of awards and fellowships, including the Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Rome Prize, and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music (for pieces commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the US Marine Band). He has composed ten concertos, seven symphonies, 100 piano études, 100 piano préludes, eight song cycles, and a large amount of wind ensemble music, chamber music, and vocal music for various combinations, as well as music for children. His music has been commissioned, recorded, and performed widely and is published by C.F. Peters. He is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University, having also taught at New England Conservatory, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford. In 2016, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife Beth, and a red canoe.

ziodavino,blogspot.com

Liliana Farber

Artist Statement

Through research-based processes and using digital strategies, I create still and moving images, installations, and web-based works. These investigate notions of land imaginaries, unmappable spaces, utopias, and techno-colonialism. I use timestamps, geolocation points, satellite imagery, antique maps, and literature as raw materials for minimal pieces that reflect on the human experience of living within global scale infrastructures and colossal amounts of data. As a third-generation holocaust survivor, my intergenerational trauma inspires my practice. There is a sense of incompleteness and illegibility in my work. It contrasts the sense of being lost or disconnected in a hyper mapped and connected world.

Blue Reflections, 2023, single channel video, steel plate, lava stones, sound, variable dimensions Digital oceans, captured in Google Earth, are intertwined as glass pieces inside a kaleidoscope.

Bio

Liliana Farber is an Uruguayan-born, New York-based, visual artist. Through research-based processes and using digital strategies, Farber investigates notions of land imaginaries, unmappable spaces, utopias, and techno-colonialism. Her work was exhibited at The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon; The Center for Books Art, New York; Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Arebyte Gallery, London; Panke Gallery, Berlin; and The National Museum of Visual Arts, Montevideo, Uruguay, among others. Farber is a recipient of the Lumen Prize, Artis grant, and Asylum Arts grant. She was an artist-in-residence at Wassaic Projects, NY, Nars Foundation, NYC, Arebyte Gallery (online), and Off Site Projects (online). Her work is part of the Victoria and Albert Museum collection in London and numerous private collections worldwide. She has been featured in On Curating, Switzerland; MIT’s Leonardo Journal, USA; and Haaretz, Israel. Farber received her MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, and her BA from ORT University, Uruguay.

https://www.lilianafarber.com/

Zoe Scofield

Artist Statement

I am a dancer, choreographer, director and teacher. My work is situated in multiple mediums including, proscenium stage, installation, film, photography, art objects and sound installation. I approach the creation and presentation of my work with a belief that dance is a visual art form and visual art is a physical form. I work using a diversity of materiality and scale to best express and fully realize a project's aim. My past work lives in opera houses as well as theaters, museums, art galleries, online platforms, and more. I am self taught and see this as an asset. Teaching myself new skills or seeking creative solutions, furthers my own research and output. I seek to disrupt and lengthen processes of perception, in order to slow down experiences for viewers and myself. The structures of my dances ask the audience to shift both physical and intellectual perspectives.

Zoe Scofield_Future Ancestors_performance/video_2021_Jacob's Pillow This is a still from an 360 performance video created as part of a larger project, The Other Shore: Future Ancestors.

Bio

Zoe Scofield (she/her), is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and a dance and visual artist based in Seattle, Washington since 2002. Zoe is the co-artistic director and founder of zoe | juniper, a dance and visual art company. Her work has been commissioned and presented by Jacob’s Pillow, New York Live Arts, On the Boards, RedCat, MASS MoCA, The Frye Art Museum, The Joyce Theater, PS 122, Carolina Performing Arts, and The Met Museum among others. Zoe works in performance, video installation, photography, opera and film. She has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, Princess Grace Foundation, NEA, NEFA, NPN and more. Her recent project, The Other Shore, is an art object, online performance, video installation presented by Jacob’s Pillow, On the Boards, Carolina Performing Arts and RedCat. Zoe earned an MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts as part of their inaugural class. www.zoejuniper.org

www.zoejuniper.org

marksearch (sue mark)

Artist Statement

marksearch projects highlight neighborly relationships and tensions arising from economic and cultural shifts. We feature local expertise to explore: whose knowledge is valued; connections between longtime and new neighbors; strategies to navigate change while preserving the past. marksearch co-creates with neighbor groups, community organizations, public historians, and local knowledge-bearers. marksearch crafts public conversational commons for sensitive, difficult dialogue. Our projects collectively celebrate and preserve multi-faceted neighborhood narratives. Commons Archive (2014) gathers and amplifies disappearing neighborhood histories in North Oakland, CA. Skill-sharing workshops, community celebrations, neighbor-led walking tours, interactive story-telling and published community scholarship nurture neighborhood sustainability. The HEAR/HERE Community Billboard, an engaged story-telling vehicle, is Commons Archive’s latest phase for empowerment and connection. Additional marksearch co-productions include a mobile sound memorial marking the Fukushima disaster’s 10th anniversary presented at Tokyo’s 2020 Olympics, and a community-generated social media campaign in San Jose, CA reframing climate-change activism.

HEAR HERE Community Billboard, Oakland CA 2020-Present Custom-built electric truck with a 6-foot digital screen, on-board sound system and an eye-catching static display board. Digital screen showcases stories from longtime Black neighbors and community-engagement questions. The Community Billboard is part of large festivals, community gatherings and block parties. Photo: Gregory Collins

Bio

For more than two decades, Oakland-based marksearch, led by cultural researcher, artist, and educator Sue Mark, has been collaboratively designing interactive opportunities for communities to amplify and preserve neighborhood narratives in Oakland, across California, nationally and internationally. marksearch explorations have been presented in cities throughout the US and in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Japan, Norway, and Portugal. Their grant-funded work has received support from many agencies including: Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, The California Arts Council, The California Humanities, The Creative Work Fund, The Fulbright Commission, The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, Oakland’s OPEN Proposals for Public Art, The San Francisco Art Commission, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding. marksearch, recipients of an Oakland Heritage Alliance Preservation Award, has also been nominated for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Award of Excellence. marksearch projects have been presented at Tokyo’s Setagaya Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and The Headlands Center for the Arts. marksearch has been honored with fellowships at the Kala Art Institute (2014-2022) and with the US Japan Friendship Commission (2016, 2019-2021).

www.marksearch.org // www.commonsarchive.net

Joseph Demes

Artist Statement

Generally, my work examines the tension between our desire for self-articulation and the commodification of the self; and how social conditions enforce a set of norms for how one “ought” to embody that self, whatever one’s personal or political intersections. I approach this by writing through the body: it is, after all, the site where these structures are internalized. The “I” is not simply a collection of categories — male, tall, straight, and so on — but rather, an expression of these internalized modes of being. In the case of my debut novel, Circumference, I examine this through the concept of America as a sports team, “a thing of ninety legs” as DeLillo puts it in his novel End Zone. I mean to investigate the pressure for men to embody certain kinds of masculinity — a "uniform" for certain American "players" — and the work it takes to resist this.

The stack of books here represents an (incomplete) example of some works that have been touchstones for my novel and that I consider myself in conversation with as a writer. Other writers and books not shown here include Anelise Chen (So Many Olympic Exertions), Don DeLillo (End Zone), Fanny Howe (The Needle's Eye), Joe Milan Jr. (The All-American), and Max Porter (Shy). The print in the background is an image from the photographer David R. Elliot's book I used to believe that I could be the next Larry Bird (Candor Arts).

Bio

Joseph Demes is an inaugural 2023–2024 Tin House Reading Fellow, and was a nominee for the 2021 PEN America Dau Prize. His work has been published in Hobart After Dark, Oyez Review, and Essay Daily, among other print and online journals. He has been awarded residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts; and has received support from the Southampton Writers Conference, the Tin House Writers Workshop, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he completed his MFA. He lives in Manhattan.

https://jdemes.github.io/

Jennifer Viola

Artist Statement

I make mixed media drawings utilizing pen, pencil, ink, gouache, acrylic, watercolor, spraypaint, oilstick, pastel, charcoal, coffee, tea or collage. I consider how to make a mark in order to convey the most with the least: light, dark, texture, energy, effort. Starting points can be impulsive: the radiant color of a Dorito, the eccentric pattern of a stone floor. Or they can be prompts to a memory: piano keys for childhood guilt over not practicing, a ring of keys for tearing apart my apartment searching for the set in my pocket. My drawings are a repository of memory, an unreliable diary, a tool to horde my surroundings. The crux of my process is to revise, exaggerate and recontextualize these various elements into an imagined still life that manages to evoke a kind of poetry. I want to reconfigure reality to reveal what is hidden, the cryptic omens in minutae.

Jennifer Viola, "Restless Legs," Mixed media on paper, 2023, 30 x 44 inches

Bio

Jennifer Viola is originally from Upstate New York. She received a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She was an Artist in Residence at the Henry Street Settlement Abrons Art Center. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, and a Macdowell Fellowship . She has worked in a variety of media: painting, found-object and ceramic sculpture, and drawing. Jennifer currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Riegelsville, Pennsylvania.

www.jenniferviola.com

Grace Cho

Artist Statement

I situate my work in the overlapping margins of creative nonfiction and interdisciplinary scholarship, exploring the ways in which geopolitical and structural violence leave an imprint on the collective psyche. I am particularly interested in the Korean War, the generations-long impact it has had on civilians, and the repression of its memory in our national narratives.

Tastes Like War cover 2021

Bio

Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 outstanding book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in The Nation, Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

gracemcho.com