FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NARS Foundation announces “Bodies We Inhabit” curated by Jessica Duby will be showcased at the NARS Foundation from April 14 through May 19.
Exhibition of mixed media by Schaun Champion, Hoesy Corona, Sara Dittrich, Phylicia Ghee, Nava Gidanian-Kagan, Noel Kassewitz, Koyoltzintli, Ceci Cole McInturff, Mirella Salamé, and Sue Wrbican
“Bodies We Inhabit” features work by ten intergenerational women and nonbinary artists exploring their spiritual, cultural, and political allyships with the earth. Through various means including metaphor, music, mythology, gesture, and satire, the artworks create a space to reflect on the ways each of us engages with the bodies of land, water, flesh, and work that surround us. Influenced by and expanding on the principles of ecofeminism, a movement that draws a parallel between the state’s attempts at dominion over women and humanity’s attempts at the subjugation of nature, “Bodies We Inhabit” illustrates artists’ takes on the importance of striving toward reciprocity between humans and non-human life forms. The works in the exhibition explore mutual care, protection, boundaries, autonomy, nonduality, and reclamation. Inspired by the interdisciplinary teachings of Vandana Shiva, Lynne Margulis, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, the exhibition emphasizes the importance of Indigenous and Black leadership, gender inclusivity, and climate justice. While such a gathering of thoughts, ideas, and objects may not have the power to directly impact climate legislation or turn bias on its head, “Bodies We Inhabit” seeks to emulate an act of solidarity humans can always offer the earth: to plant a seed.
NARS Foundation will host a public opening reception Friday, April 14 from 6-8pm at 201 46th St, Brooklyn, NY 11220.
Artwork Descriptions
Several artists in the exhibition tell their stories using earth materials:
In a series of performances, Koyoltzintli plays reconstructed pre-Columbian instruments that have been locked away in museums, reclaiming their sounds and sovereignty. Through this act, her body becomes a vessel for a primal creative force, reaffirming her own and others’ connection to the earth.
In an installation at the center of the exhibition, Phylicia Ghee sheds light on the displacement and forced dispossession Black and Indigenous communities faced throughout history and into the present using soil sourced from the original site of Seneca Village and her Grandfather’s garden.
Mirella Salamé processes earth pigments into an iron-rich paint whose color approximates blood, which she uses in performative paintings that symbolize warmth, power, and fertility.
Ceci Cole McInturff uses organic ephemera to turn cast sculptures into mythological bird-human hybrids that hold timeless lessons.
Other artists illustrate interdependence through visual metaphors:
In lyrical portraits of Black community members as “Black Bouquets,” Schaun Champion captures the joy, delicateness, and strength in her subjects as they enjoy serene moments of connection with trees, plants, and flowers.
In her painting “Curved Back Mountain,” Nava Gidanian-Kagan portrays a back bent forward in prayer as a mountain--her personal symbol of constancy and stillness.
In Sara Dittrich’s photography series “Traces of Tide and Time,” the low-tide moments that are soon to be erased a few hours later, represent the rise and fall of breath, liminality, and life’s transience.
And several artists confront the body-politic of climate change directly:
Hoesy Corona’s intricately woven “Climate Poncho” highlights the complex relationship between humans and the environment by focusing on our changing climate’s impact on habitation and migration patterns. Each Climate Poncho pictures a character or group journeying from a land made uninhabitable by the warming climate.
Noel Kassewitz examines how a painter copes with the continuous threat of obsolescence in a rapidly changing environmental landscape. For her “Rococo Remastered” series, a body of floatable artworks inspired by the Rococo period in art history and the threat of rising sea levels, she paints pool floats injected with expanding marine foam with classic characters from famous Rococo paintings recast as contemporary American cultural figures.
Sue Wrbican explores intersections between the environment, labor, and surrealism in “Ship Split #1,” a foreboding photograph of a sculpture of a ship splitting created from shipment detritus and studio scraps.
Opening reception:
Friday April 14, 6-8 PM
NARS Foundation main gallery
201 46th St, Brooklyn, NY 11220
NARS Foundation Galleries are open to the public from 12pm - 5pm, Monday - Friday