Nicole Miller

Artist Statement

Much of my work as a fiction writer, essayist, and critic centers around questions of memory, mourning, movement, and home. I’m especially interested in thinking with contemporary art and literature that helps us make sense of questions about identity, family inheritance, and loss. My approach to these subjects combines rigorous inquiry with the pleasures of uncertainty. My work often slips between forms—stories with a querying, essayistic bent; personal narrative that draws on the tools of fiction or engages critically with cultural artifacts. Additionally, I’m drawn to collaborative work, from co-authored scholarship to the collective labor of running Underwater New York, a community-based arts project that includes a publishing platform, public programming, and institutional partnerships.

My short story "Junkwater Sovereign" is included in the book Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City’s Forgotten Waterfront, which examines more than 600 miles of coastline through rare photographs, history, new fiction and contemporary art.

Bio

I’m a writer, editor, and educator living in Brooklyn. I’ve contributed fiction, essays, and cultural criticism to publications such as Art in America, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Lit Hub, Catapult, and Fence. I teach creative writing at NYU’s School of Professional Studies and serve as an editor for Underwater New York, a digital arts platform that centers the waters of New York City. I earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and have received residencies and awards from the Milton Center at Seattle Pacific University, the Wassaic Project, and Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation.

nicolemariemiller.net

Phoebe Tran

Artist Statement

The food that I grow and cook is rooted in the ancestral traditions of my family. It is a lifelong journey in seeking to understand what it means to be both Vietnamese and American, a child of refugees, and more recently, a daughter without a mother. It is a means to forge a relationship to land in a way that preserves my cultural identity, while adapting to my native surroundings. My approach to cooking explores the possibility of recreating the Vietnamese flavor that existed before industrialization and colonization. It regards edible plants not just as ingredients, but as vessels for inquiry and storytelling, as medicine, as part of a larger living ecosystem. Growing and adapting them to the Northeast climate is a means to resist, survive, and thrive.

Chè Thạch Rau Câu, basil seed and mung bean agar jellies with lychee, nata de coco, and palm nut. in pandan coconut milk

Bio

Phoebe Tran is a Vietnamese-American chef, farmer, and educator based in Lenapehoking, Brooklyn. She runs a roaming popup called Bé Bếp, which offers traditionally-inspired Vietnamese dishes featuring ingredients she has grown herself or sourced from local farms. Her research-based practice reflects on the adaptation of humans and plants in nonnative environments, folk medicine, and cultural preservation. She former founded Happy Family Night Market, an annual festival that celebrated the Asian diaspora through food, art, and education.

Ching-In Chen & Cassie Mira

Artist Statement: Cassie Mira

Cassie Mira's work analyzes transitional spaces by exploring human interaction through transitional experiences and investigating upheaval. Informed by research in LGBTQIA+ history and the development of modern computing, she investigates adaptive responses of individuals and communities. Her work incorporates field recordings, assemblage, installation, performance and ritual.

Artist Statement: Ching-In Chen

I am a cross-genre writer with a community organizing background, specifically in Asian American communities in coalition with other communities of color and LGBTQIA* communities. My creative work arises from my community investments and is grounded in the framework of speculative poetics. In developing collective imagination, the central question I ask is – what is our relationship and responsibility to each other through time and history? What do we want, dream it to be? As a maker, my work incorporates multivocality and juxtaposition.and values improvisation (using what’s in the room) within a social space to create meaningful work for participants and gathered community. I honor simultaneous truths and lived experiences within the same space by foregrounding poetry's compositional strategies incorporating silence, rupture, collage and repetition.

postcard image for breathing in a time of disaster project, two sound wave forms of breath collide to form a stitched lung on a multicolored fabri

Bios

Cassie Mira is an artist, curator, and archivist based in Seattle, WA. Her interdisciplinary practice is based in new media, poetry, and performance, plays with human interaction and denatures gendered experience. She was an artist-in-residence at The Seattle Residency Project in 2020.

Ching-In Chen is descended from ocean dwellers and author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They teach at University of Washington Bothell. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice.

https://www.cassiemira.com

www.chinginchen.com

Benae Beamon

Artist Statement

Tap dance is the primary force in my work and the basis for my rhythmic lexicon as a performance artist. This lexicon, inspired by hip hop, jazz, spoken word, and west and south African movement and sound, allows me to craft silence using sound with an intentionally Afrocentric frame. My work deals with questions of historical archiving, ritual, power, and black existence, by drawing from traditional movements in black culture (both historical and personal). As a performance artist, I am committed to creating work where tap dance and performance become sites of existence rather than events with a clear beginning or end. I access this using tap dance and black ritual/inspiration to deny the invisibility of black life, acknowledge intersectional identity as powerful, and highlight that blackness and queerness are keys to abundance, hope, and endless possibility.

Benae Beamon_"Time Blackened"_performance_2019_premiered at ICA VCU as part of the Greater Force exhibition

Bio

Benae Beamon was raised in North Carolina, and her work is informed by black, Southern culture. She holds a B.A. from Colgate University, an M.A. in Religion from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Social Ethics from Boston University. As a performance artist, Beamon uses movement, rhythm, space, and language as tools to sculpt sound and highlight the rich place where race, gender, sexuality and class intersect with culture and ritual. Both her artistic work and scholarship examine the extraordinary and spectacular in the everyday, focusing on the way that the mundane can be sacred ritual. She has performed at Joe’s Pub in New York City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston with Subject:Matter, a Boston-based tap dance company. Independently, she was a 2019 finalist for the Hudgen's Prize and has premiered work at VCU Institute for Contemporary Art and, most recently, at Arts on Site in New York City.

http://www.benaebeamon.com

Tsering Yangzom Lama

Artist Statement

I see my writing as a way to access and understand the unknowable past. A way to fight against the invisibility of my family's and people's experiences. For centuries, my country and my people have served as a canvas for the fantasies and stories of other people. But Tibetans have yet to tell our own stories to global audiences. As my country is wiped off maps, as our histories are revised by a colonial occupier, I feel that the creative work of storytelling is a vital terrain of struggle and remembrance. Right now, I'm particularly interested in diving into Tibetan Buddhist cosmologies within the tantric mandala teaching. Comparing that form of traditional mapping to colonial mapping techniques, I'm interested in showing the competing ideologies and strategies of different worldviews and powers.

Tsering_Yangzom_Lama_We_Measure_the_Earth_with_our_Bodies

Bio

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, WE MEASURE THE EARTH WITH OUR BODIES, is a New York Times Summer Reads Pick and a finalist for The Scotiabank Giller Prize, and longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and The Toronto Book Award. She holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from the University of British Columbia. She currently lives in Vancouver, Canada.

tseringlama.com

Claudia O’Steen & Aly Ogasian

ARTIST STATEMENT

O’Steen and Ogasian work collaboratively to produce multimedia, research based installations. Their work incorporates sculptural elements, digital media, drawing, writing, and photography. Their projects always involve fieldwork, and installations incorporate artifacts and “data” collected from the landscape itself, and they are inspired by their immediate surroundings. Their work focuses on their relationship with the changing environment, and uses methodologies borrowed from citizen science to critique traditional notions of exploration and conquest. They attempt to re-orient themselves in a contemporary world dominated by data and technology, where the romantic and adventurous spirit of discovery has been lost or forgotten. They are interested in the moments where science and technology give rise to the nebulous, the enigmatic, the mysterious -- where the primary goal is to “make sense” rather than to objectively know.

Claudia O’Steen_Keweenaw Observing Station_installation_2022_dimensions na/ Rabbit Island, Lake Superior, MI. Keweenaw Observing Station is a collaborative multimedia artwork that examines the effect of climate change on Lake Superior and the Great Lakes System. The work consists of a series of site-responsive, portable sculptures that function as observational stations/instrumentation as well as repositories of information. These sculptures are inspired by local NOAA monitoring systems, such as the Great Lakes Water Levels Monitoring Network. The instruments poetically measure wind, waves, visibility, water level, and temperature, exploring both the possibilities and limitations afforded by perceptual observation. Within the artwork, our observations are contextualized vis-a-vis large, ongoing collections of data via satellite imagery, scientific instrumentation, human memory, and citizen science intended to help predict the future of the lake. The project touches upon the lake as a “site of memory” by examining how winter conditions contribute to subsequent summers while also engaging human memory and direct experience.

Bio

O’Steen and Ogasian have been awarded collaborative residencies at Rabbit Island, Wassaic Project, Montalvo Arts Center, Maajaam Estonia, The Arctic Circle, and NCCA St.Petersburg, Russia, amongst others and have exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues such as The Russian State Arctic Museum, apexart, Flux Factory, and Ohio State University.

Claudia received a BFA from Watkins College of Art and an MFA in Digital+Media at Rhode Island School of Design. She resides in Rock Hill, South Carolina, USA and is a Professor of Fine Arts at Winthrop University.

Aly received a BFA from Queen’s University and a MFA in Digital+Media at Rhode Island School of Design. She is based in Los Angeles, California, USA and is a Professor of Art+Design at Scripps College.

https://claudiaosteen.com/

www.alysonogasian.com

Katherine Pukinskis

Artist Statement

In the broadest sense, nature, the human experience, and heritage are the three driving factors of inspiration for my creation of new music. I am gratified by the immediacy of effect when I listen to music, and I cherish its lingering forces well after the sound is gone. For me, no music is absolute; I do not live in a vacuum devoid of outside stimuli, nor can I exclude portions of myself in the act of creating music. While it is rarely my intention to compose a direct response to a specific experience, philosophy, or work of art, the moments of our lives leave a residue on our future thoughts. This residue is for me found predominantly in the natural world and in ancestral heritage; it is what sparks the inspiration to compose.

Early sketches for "The Mother Trees" project, which I will work on in earnest while in residency at the Marble House

Bio

Katherine Pukinskis is a composer-scholar whose work often brings unlikely text or content into conversation in the concert hall. “I Dissent,” a project started by a 2019 commission from the Esoterics, excerpts opinions and dissents written by the female Supreme Court Justices of the United States. Dr. Pukinskis has had works premiered by eighth blackbird, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Akron Symphony Chorus, and the Spektral Quartet, as well as by members of Ensemble Dal Niente and the Chicago Symphony Chorus. Commissioning ensembles include San Antonio Symphony, Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, Akropolis Reed Quintet, Agarita Chamber Players, Heritage Chorale, the Esoterics Choir, Mägi Ensemble, and Nuorten Kuoroliitto (Helsinki Finland). Her work in composition and research explore storytelling and voice—tracking how words and ideas travel in music, across the world, and over time. Dr. Pukinskis’s scholarly research revolves around notions of cultural identity, diaspora, traditional folk and choral music, and activism, with particular emphasis on the choral music of Latvia and 20th-century American Art Song. She has presented her research across the United States and Europe in conferences, pre-concert lectures, and invited talks. Pukinskis is currently an Assistant Professor of Music in Composition and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Music.

www.kpukinskis.com