Image courtesy of Amelia Iaia
A performance series in the gallery hosted in conjunction with EFA Open Studios. Performers were nominated by artists featured in As Far as the Heart Can See, and include former mentees, current students, assistants, and younger artists whose work they admire: Nina Isabelle, Sindy Butz, Elena Bajo, Xinan (Helen) Ran, and Larissa Gilbert.
PARTICIPANTS
Elena Bajo is an artist, choreographer and cofounder of the LA collective D’CLUB dedicated to climate action. Her artistic practice occurs at the intersection of anarchist thought, social ecology and metaphysics, engaging ideas of nature, and the body as a political and social entity questioning its relationship to ecologies of capital. She works both individually and collectively, using an interdisciplinary approach, sculpture, performance, architecture, life sciences, text and video. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Audemars Piguet award, ArcoMadrid and the Botin Foundation International Visual Arts Grant award. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. She divides her time between America and Europe. Bajo’s performance at EFA is supported by a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and in-kind support from Spain Arts and Culture.
Sindy Butz is a New York-based interdisciplinary visual artist, somatic movement educator, and Butoh dancer. Butz's research-based practice spans the disciplines of performance art, body art, multisensory installation, performance-based photography/video art, contemporary ceramics, and olfactoric projects. In her time-based work, she investigates belief systems, ideologies, sociopolitical transformation processes, identity, human biology, memory formation, and the collective unconscious. Butz recently concluded the Linda Mary Montano Art/Life Institute residency in Kingston and has been nominated for the Greenwich House Pottery Residency. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. She earned a B.F.A. in sculpture from AKI- ARTez Netherland, and an M.F.A. in Art in Context from the University of the Arts (UdK), Berlin Germany.
Larissa Gilbert is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA. They received their BFA from the Cooper Union in New York City. Larissa’s work investigates the presence of European myth, fairytale, and ritual in cinema and pop culture and how this affects community segregation, racial hierarchy, and gender binaries in the United States. Past and current research includes My Little Pony, Greek Mythology, Playboy, Barbie, Sorority Hazing, and Cults. Recently, they have exhibited and screened their work at the Nakanojo Biennial in Japan, Anthology Film Archives, and the historic Cooper Union Great Hall.
Nina Isabelle is a process-based artist working with language, perception, action and phenomena. As a way to reveal information lateral to everyday awareness, Isabelle builds systems designed to locate, decipher and authenticate instinct, choice, action and awareness. Her approach aims to tether the collective, personal, and regional narratives that drive the performance space machine toward trajectories of new perception, belief, and possibilities.
Born and raised in China, Xinan (Helen) Ran received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2017 and is an incoming Hunter College MFA Painting candidate. Her multimedia exploration constructs fabricated memories via defamiliarized norms and textures. Xinan is a 2016 Ox-Bow fellow and an alumnae of Pearson College UWC (2013).
This event takes place in conjunction with As Far as the Heart Can See (September 21 – November 17, 2018).