Artist Statement
just to (healthily) love and be loved in return
Performance shot from DOAT
Nina Wise
Artist Statement
I work in many genres, primarily performance, music, and writing. What characterizes my work across genres is my focus on integrating personal narrative with pressing socio-political issues. I have created large-scale high-tech multimedia productions, most recently immersive works designed for planetarium domes. And I also create low tech solo performance works often improvised and autobiographical. I write, My stories and essays have been published in many journals and anthologies. And I am composing songs for an album based on the Tibetan Buddhist teachings of Anam Thubten Rinpoche. I am devoted to addressing the most pressing issues of our era through the intimate lens of our lived lives in an effort to cast light on the complexities of human nature and how we can give rise to wisdom and compassion.
NinaWise_TheKeplerStory_2016. An immersive solo performance work about 17th C astronomer and mystic Johannes Kepler created in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences for planetarium domes.
Bio
Since earning her degree in Religious Studies and the Aesthetics of Movement, Nina Wise has devoted her career to developing theater that addresses the complex relationship between body, intellect, and spirit. She is the founder of Motion Theater®, a highly physical form of autobiographical improvisation that is both an art form and a transformative pracitce. Her original theater works, performed in prestigious venues in the US, South America, Europe and Asia have won awards for playwriting, innovative design, and new theater including four NEA fellowships and seven Bay Area Theater Critics’ Circle Awards. She is the writer/director of The Kepler Story, an immersive theater piece about 17th Century astronomer and mystic Johannes Kepler designed for planetarium domes developed in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences where it premiered at Morrison Planetarium. Nina is also the author of A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life (Broadway Books), and many of her written pieces have appeared in magazines and anthologie including The Sun, Tricycle, Yoga Journal, and Shambala Sun. In addition, Nina is a longtime practitioner of Buddhist meditation and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Nina lives in San Rafael, California.
www.ninawise.com, www.motiontheater.org, www.thekeplerstory.com
Su-Yee Lin
Artist Statement
As a first-generation Chinese American, my writing draws inspiration from the storytelling of both my cultures as well as the clash of their differing concerns. My work revolves around the themes of environment, mythology, and identity: I think about the ways in which we as humans perceive the world and our own identities. About how habits are defined by background, how people are changed into stereotypes, how there are so many nuances to what it means to belong and to connect. More recently, my concerns have broadened to incorporate nature and ecology and our place in local ecosystems. I’m moved by the ways in which nature constantly surprises us with its creativity, its resilience, but also its fragility.
Work-in-progress for Infinite Islands
Bio
Su-Yee Lin is a writer from New York. Her work has been published in The Offing, Day One, Electric Literature, Strange Horizons, Bennington Review, EVENT, Tor.com, Nashville Review, Quarterly West, khoreo magazine, and other literary journals, and have been anthologized in Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and residencies and grants from the Center for Fiction, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jentel, Storyknife, Crosstown Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, Seoul Art Space, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and others. Her writing has been translated into Chinese and Italian. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel.
https://suyeelin.com
Chau Nguyen
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist who draws from intersecting archives to construct transnational art objects. In my work, I contemplate my positioning as a Vietnamese artist against Western canonical influences and contemporary art market/ supply chain elements. Due to my idea-driven practice, I work with a wide range of materials such as color pigment, found materials, wood, sand, and technology processes (CNC machining, 3D scanning, 3D printing, and video). I emphasize conceptual colors as reflections of cultural fragments embedded within the work.
Nguyen_Landscape Didacticism_sand painting_2022_13x10m_VCCA Vietnam. Documentation by Minh Nguyen
Bio
Chau Nguyen (b. Hanoi, Vietnam) (they/she) is a Vietnamese immigrant artist and educator based in Philadelphia. They navigate the intersection of art, technology, private/ collective memory, Vietnamese histories, and popular culture in their creation of transnational art objects. Nguyen received their BA in Fine Arts and History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and their MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Their artist residencies include Millay Arts (upcoming), Byrdcliffe Artist Residency, Wassaic Project, 77Art Center and Chautauqua Art Institution. Their work has been in group and solo exhibitions at the National Liberty Museum, The Delaware Contemporary, The Woodmere Art Museum, Pentimenti Gallery, Commonweal Gallery, Temple Contemporary, The Visionary Projects, HOT•BED Philly, Automat Collective, The Monmouth Museum, Studio Montclair, Philadelphia Sketch Club, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art Vietnam, Gallery Steinsland Berliner, among others. Nguyen has received fellowships, grants, and awards from The Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio at Temple University Libraries, the Woodmere Art Museum, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, The Alternative Art School, The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, Chautauqua Art Institute, Bryn Mawr College, DIS Copenhagen, and FPT-Arena Multimedia.
https://chauspace.com
Landon Newton
Artist Statement
Landon Newton is an artist, gardener, and independent researcher whose practice explores the reciprocal relationships between plants and people. Landon incorporates installation, photography, and site-specific works to explore themes of permanence, historical distortion, custodianship, care, and maintenance using living plants as materials. Her ongoing project The Abortion Herb Garden, considers the marginalization of plant knowledge and investigates the pluralist identities of plants and the historical amnesia surrounding the use of plants for contraception, birth control, abortion, and plant medicine.
Landon Newton, FEMM HORTUS, 2021, multimedia installation. An interactive installation and animation documenting herbariums in the year 2121 focusing on the biennial Daucus carota, (Wild Carrot) encompassing medicinal use, abortifacient and contraceptive use, wild cultivation, plant migration, and communication exploring speculative plant futures.
Bio
Landon's work has been exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Frieze NY, WIENWOCHE, Vienna, Austria, CICA Museum, South Korea, EcoFutures: Deep Trash, London, UK, Open Engagement, Queens Museum, Queens, NY, and Gagosian Quarterly. Recent recognitions include an Emergency Artist Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and On Our Radar 2021, Creative Capital. Fellowships and residencies include Denniston Hill, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Landon received her MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her BA in History from Smith College.
https://landon-newton.com/
Mallika Singh
Artist Statement
My art practice/s are rooted in my environment/s and my relationships. In everything I do, I am deeply committed to process and play. Even when cooking and farming, I am a poet. I believe in poetry that is active, an action. Poem as something we do. River as something we do. I am interested in food, poetry, and ritual as tools to access our singular and collective imaginations. Food has always been a sensory and embodied experience for me. I am inspired by the ingenuity and skill of my mama/s, the histories and archives of culinary practice, and the innovation, exchange, and care that occurs through/with food – amidst apocalypse and amidst celebration. I dream of a food system that enacts a life beyond capitalism through collectivity, knowledge sharing, and the redistribution of resources, land, and power.
PHOTO CREDIT - mk blurry gloves hand reaches for a lamb chop resting on a bed of mashed turnips and stewed greens. other dishes on the table include a citrus salad and radicchio salad.
Bio
mallika singh is a poet, farmer, and cook who makes work about ecosystems and intimacies. in collaboration with Rebeca Alderete Baca, mallika ran OOZE— an event series that celebrates poetry, ritual, and gathering. mallika also facilitates a study and writing group called Rivering Towards: Desert-Water Poetics and Politics. their debut chapbook, Retrieval, was published in 2020 from Wendy's Subway. mallika was born in Delhi, India and raised in the Bay Area, CA and Santa Fe, NM. they are currently living under the open skies of New Mexico and growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers with their coworkers at Ashokra Farm.
Martha Silano
Artist Statement
My poems often center on the natural world and rely heavily on lived experience, often focusing on our Earth’s flora, fauna, bioregions, and geologic features. I also write about astrophysics and the cosmos. Increasingly, my work has centered around environmental peril, climate grief/optimism/hope, and the Anthropocene, and calling attention to changing weather patterns, forest fires, warming seas, endangered species, and the need to act quickly to reduce carbon outputs. I am urgently drawn to catalogue the species that are managing to survive, along with those that are not, and exposing the ways human beings are leading us toward catastrophe. Influential writers include Craig Santos Perez, Claire Wahmanholm, Barbara Ungar, Elizabeth Bradfield, and Geffrey Davis. I am motivated by an unceasing passion for poetry; it’s my excuse to learn all I can during this brief period I am alive.
Martha Silano_front cover_Gravity Assist_2019
Bio
Martha Silano is the author of five collections of poetry, including Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She is also co-author, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and in many print anthologies, including the Best American Poetry series, and Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poem on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press 2023). Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize. She’s received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, among others. Martha teaches at Bellevue College. Her website is available at marthasilano.net.
marthasilano.net
Nathalie Miebach
Artist Statement
Nathalie Miebach explores the intersection of art and science by translating scientific data related to meteorology, ecology and oceanography into woven sculptures and musical scores/ performances. Her main method of data translation is that of basket weaving, which functions as a simple, tactile grid through which to interpret data into 3D space. Central to this work is her desire to explore the role visual and musical aesthetics play in the translation and understanding of complex scientific systems, such as weather.
Ian and Nicole, 2023, 15'x9'x1'. This is a piece that looks at the destruction and rebuilding of Daytona Beach after Hurricane Ian and Nicole passed through in the Fall of 2022.