A conversation between artist and researcher Ellie Irons and Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble artist Gaye Chan, on weediness. Presented as part of Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble, curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam, and Marina Zurkow.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Gaye Chan
Gaye Chan is a conceptual artist who moves between solo and collaborative activities that take place on the web, in publications, streets as well as galleries. Her recent work often ruminates on how cartography and photography simultaneously offer and occlude information. Past exhibition venues include Art in General (New York City), Articule (Montreal), Artspeak (Vancouver), Asia Society (New York City), Gallery 4A (Sydney), Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu), SF Camerawork (San Francisco), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), and YYZ Artist Outlet (Toronto).
Chan’s collaborative projects include being a part of Eating in Public and Downwind Productions. Eating in Public is an anti-capitalism project nudging a little space outside of the commodity system. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, they gather at people’s homes, plant free food gardens on private and public land, set up free stores, all without permission. Downwind examines the impact of colonialism, capitalism, and tourism. Through agitprop commodities and web media, DownWind takes up Waikiki as an actual specific site/sight and a metaphor for countless other places where self-sustaining peoples have been dislocated for profit.
Gaye Chan was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States in 1969. She received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and is a professor of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
Chan’s work has been supported by Art Matters and the Creative Capital Foundation.
Ellie Irons
Ellie Irons is an artist and educator living and working on Mohican land in current-day Troy, New York, USA. From foraged watercolor paintings to un-lawning experiments, her work combines socially engaged art, ecology fieldwork, and embodied learning. She is a co-founder of the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency, collaborations investigating relationships between humans and spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds). Her solo and collaborative work has been part of recent exhibitions on contemporary environmental art, including The Department of Human and Natural Services at NURTUREArt, Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator at Wave Hill, and Unsettled Nature at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Her work has been covered by publications ranging from Art in America to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Irons received a BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. In December 2021, She completed a PhD in arts practice at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, focusing on artistic practice for cultivating plant-human solidarity and ecosocial justice in an age of extraction and climate chaos. She is currently an environmental educator at Radix Ecological Sustainability Center and an artist in residence at Basilica Hudson.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.