A conversation with writer and researcher Heather Davis and Sprout artists Anna Rose Hopkins and Marina Zurkow about the legacies of plastic, oceans, and kin, and infinity, as part of our series of programs around the installation Languish at the End of the Ocean (2022) by Hopkins and Zurkow, presented in Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble. This immersive installation can be experienced at EFA Project Space through May 14. Fashioned as a self-service spa, the installation features the artists’ guided meditation Soupy Salty Sonic: A Liquid Wanting which invites the audience to voyage through undersea depths as their body morphs to become part of the ocean.

Please RSVP on Eventbrite for the Zoom link.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Dylan Gauthier, Radhika Subramaniam and Marina Zurkow, and featuring installations by Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma, Anna Rose Hopkins + Marina Zurkow, Del Hardin Hoyle, Sal Randolph, and collaborators, Sprout Hinge Nap Wobble is a group exhibition that invites the public to feel planetary relationalities at a time of planetary crisis. The vicious systems and wilful actions that are responsible for today’s planetary catastrophe have spawned an attendant industry of planning—preparedness, scenario planning, emergency management—that directs itself to the future, to anticipation, to fear, to escape. Through a series of arrangements and encounters, Sprout explores the material and metaphorical ways in which connections are possible in a climate of uncertainty—neither wholly optimistic nor utterly despairing, neither propelled by urgency nor foreclosed, but held within their vibrating tensions.

BIOS

Heather Davis is a writer, researcher and teacher whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is also a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Anna Rose Hopkins is a performing artist and chef by trade who plays at the intersection of food, theater and narrative. Her work considers food systems, the Anthropocene, affective labor and hierarchies of service. Her collaborative works have been supported by Swissnex SF, Getty PST:LA/LA the Barbara Seiler Gallery. Film/TV works of note include Dark Night (dir. Tim Sutton), Amos World (dir. Cécile B. Evans), and Gregory Go Boom (dir. Janicza Bravo). Anna Rose is co-founder of Farm2People, bolstering the farm to food bank supply chain; chef and co-owner at Hank and Bean; writer/actor with IAMA Theatre Company. 

Media and participatory practice artist Marina Zurkow connects people to nature-culture tensions and environmental messes with humor and affection. Her work has been featured at Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Storm King Art Center, New York; the 7th Moscow Biennale; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is represented by bitforms gallery and resides in the Hudson Valley, New York.

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.

ACCESS INFO

The event will feature live transcription. Video of the talk will be posted with captions after the event. Please contact projectspace@efanyc.org if you have specific access needs or requests.

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.