Sammi Gay

Artist Statement

I am deeply moved by food and cities! My work orbits around these two heartbeats. For years, my artistic focus was primarily culinary - cooking and plating, of course, alongside the art of feeding people, paired with time capsules of food preservation. I make fermented beverages, vinegars, condiments, and spice blends; all using hyper-regional and foraged goods with the goal of capturing the flavors of a changing earth. For a long time, my other art mediums surrounded food - endless kitchen diaries, poems, and photographs aiming to capture the dance of the table and the lingering residue of meals. They still do but in the last few years my practice has expanded immensely including dioramic sculptures and printmaking.

Jazz hands, making focaccia in my kitchen with a friend. Photo credit Cherry Ayala.

Bio

Sammi Gay is a “kitchen-poet” (a la Edwidge Danticat) from the Bronx. Trained as an urban planner and farmer, Gay incorporates writing, cooking, and sculpture to probe at questions grounded in practices of preservation and collective memory. For Gay, fermentation — the chemical breakdown of organic matter by bacteria, yeasts, or other microorganisms — is not only a cooking strategy; the method is also a regenerative embodied practice. Ferments, which call for an association of microbiomes to survive, model necessary social processes for building sustainable communities. Gay observes the tenets of fermentation in their work through theory and praxis: the social practice artist centers themes of community preservation in their writing, sculpture, and culinary creations.

Connie Zheng

Artist Statement

I am a Chinese-American artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker. For the past seven years, I’ve been moving between drawing, text, installation and time-based practices to examine the interplays of diasporic memory, culture and environmental history. Since 2021, I have been making wall-sized map drawings as a method for inviting audiences to re-orient to our surroundings — especially places we consider ‘home’ — in productively alien ways, by combining narratives of the land that are sometimes buried or marginalized. My works are grounded in a diasporic sense of belonging, an awe for the multiplicity of place, and an attunement to the intersections of personal narrative, communal histories, and land use. Collage is my primary aesthetic strategy: I see my maps as collages of public and private knowledge; my films as containers for collaging time, voice and narrative; and my sound work as collages of sonic encounters between my body and its surroundings.

Guest Passage, 2023. 12-channel sound installation with video projection. Installed for the Bay Area Now 9 Triennial at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Photography by Jenna Garrett

Bio

Connie Zheng was born in north-central China and is based out of Northern California, on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people. Her projects have been exhibited and screened internationally, including at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA), Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), Framer Framed (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and the Esker Foundation (Calgary, Canada). Her work is held in the permanent collections of KADIST and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Robert H. N. Ho Foundation, among other organizations, and recent press of her work includes coverage in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and MUBI Notebook. Her publications include a chapter in the “Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change”, as well as essays in Small Press Traffic and Errant Journal. She graduated with BAs in Economics and English from Brown University and an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

https://www.conniezheng.com/

Stefan Pavlovic

Artist Statement

I stuttered heavily as a child, causing an interest in language, which I see as a body of water: numerous sources, leaks, inflows, and outflows, in all directions - in a collective effort to reach the recesses of memory. My three languages - English, Dutch, and Bosnian - each carry a different amount of stuttering, providing a unique relationship with each. I use cinema, my fourth language, as a means of encountering people, places, histories, and languages. I work primarily in experimental documentary film. I have wondered – how can I make films through intimate means? My method ‘filming through spending time’, fosters connection marked by a desire to understand, to listen and pay attention. I work on ways to use the camera to evoke the process of bonding - from filming intimacy to filming intimately - while acknowledging its influence on reality.

A screenshot from my current film-project.

Bio

Stefan Pavlovic (b. 1989) is an award-winning filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam. His debut feature film Looking for Horses (2021) has been screened at over forty international film festivals, and won fifteen prizes, among others, the Burning Lights Competition at Visions du Reel, Jury Prize at Sarajevo Film Festival, Grand Prix at RIDM, Best Film at Kasseler Dokfest. Stefan was awarded the Prins Bernhard Documentary Stipend in 2021 and was selected for the Berlinale Talents program in 2022. He is a programmer at the Eastern Neighbours Film Festival and at the International Film Festival Assen, in the Netherlands. Stefan received his BA in film directing at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and his MA at the Netherlands Film Academy in Artistic Research in and through Cinema.

www.stefanpavlovic.com

Cindy Lan

Artist Statement

My creative process is the sincerest personal expression I can share, manifested in the vessels of strings, voice, electronics, and movement/stillness. My growth as a composer is inextricable from my acceptance of the seemingly disparate parts of my life’s experiences and celebration of their coalescence in me. I’m a classically trained emo kid with the eavesdropping skills of a New Yorker, a born & raised Queens kid with a knack for picking up different cultures’ languages and rhythms. This becomes distilled through my daily practices, and flows into the music I create. My intention is to create sound worlds that people can relate to, and find both familiarity and newness therein. I do not consider mastery to be the final accomplishment; rather, I hope to continually share where I am, as Thich Nhat Hanh describes it, in adopting ‘interbeing’ in all aspects of my life.

Cindy Lan Solo Performance - May 2024 Photographer: Raphael Galvis

Bio

Cindy Lan is a violist, composer, and collaborative artist from Queens, NY. Since 2019, she has explored the combination of voice, strings, and electronics in her project ‘Breath & Bow Meditations’. Through these meditations, she seeks to understand facets of her emotional world as they manifest in looped strings, extended techniques, and their interplay with the human voice. She performed as a soloist with Orchestra Northern Arizona in 2021 and 2023. She is a 2023 recipient of the Queens Art Fund New Work grant for “Dots on Plates”, a viola concerto for string orchestra and percussion. Her string quartet, Ondine Quartet, is a 2024 Chamber Music America Ensemble Forward grantee. She performs with Isogram and is a contributing choreographer and performer for “Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia” by Sugar Vendil, and performed at National Sawdust, Lincoln Center, and Movement Research at Judson with Isogram. She is a pedagogue with over a decade of experience, and the Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Orchestra. Her band EMDR with guitarist Julia Monica writes songs based on themes of trauma, DV, and healing. She holds an MM in Viola Performance from the Eastman School of Music, and a Bachelor of Arts from Skidmore College.

cindylan.com

Symara Johnson

Artist Statement

My choreographic practice navigates the complexities of my personal and cultural histories through movement, sound, and research. At present, I am interested in creating worlds inside of proscenium spaces that create space for queer Black femme anarchical play. I am presently in conversation with how the black femme body can access authentic liberation and autonomy. Thus far to achieve this I have cultivated safe improvisational dance spaces that allow for the fullness of the black emotional body to live by generating scores that give space to engage with rage, sorrow, joy and more. I create the space to access suppressed emotionality in community as a way to be in proximity to liberation. I am researching and creating self-generated tools to be in proximity to autonomy/freedom, of which improvisation is an access point. When given these tools how does our engagement with life shift? When we create room to engage safely with our physical, emotional, and mental do we reclaim power and dismantle inhibitors? I am currently in practice with the black feminine, specifically exploring what it asks for to gain liberation and its range of autonomy, and how to translate and present these inquiries in performance spaces.

Symara sarai_ photo of performance New York Live Arts_ Photo credit: Whitney Brown

Bio

Symara Sarai(They/She), a Portland, Oregon native currently residing in Brooklyn, has immersed herself in interdisciplinary and choreographic studies globally. A 2023 Bessie Winner for Breakout Choreographer, Symara is also a recipient of the Dai Ailian Foundation Scholarship based in Trinidad and Tobago. The scholarship led her to Beijing, China where she spent two years gaining an associate degree in modern choreography at the renowned Beijing Dance Academy. Symara is a 2019 graduate of SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Dance Program. She has been involved in Bearnstow's Artist in residence program, Gibney 6.2 Work Up, Gallim’s 2022 Moving Artist’s Residency, BAX’s Fall 2022 Space Grant Program, and Center for Performance Research’s 2022 AIR Program. She was recently a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist 23/24 as well as a 23/24 Women in Motion Commissioned artist. They are currently a Movement Research Artist in Residence and a Abrons Arts Center Performance AIRspace Resident. Their work as a performer and maker has been reviewed and featured in the NY Times, Dance Enthusiast, Fjord, as well as promoted through Forbes. They have presented work at New York Live Arts, The Clarice at UMD, The LGBT Center in NY, Judson Church, BAAD, Kestrels, and other venues throughout the United States, China, and Germany. She is currently an Urban Bush Women company member. She has also notably worked with Jasmine Hearn, Ogemdi Ude, Pioneers Go East Collective, Kevin Wynn, Joanna Kotze, Nattie Trogdon+Hollis Bartlett, and Slowdanger, among others.

symarasarai.com

Carolyn Orosz

Artist Statement

I am currently working on a collection of poems that explores different kinds of labor–the physical and mental labor of manual work, the particular labor of girlhood, stewardship for both the environment and self. When I first started writing the collection I had been doing seasonal outdoor work—on trail crews, as a wilderness field instructor, and as the leader of an all-female wildland fire crew. At the heart of the collection is an exploration of the very first hard job I ever did—watching my father die as a girl—and the labor of the grief that reverberated after. I am interested in the myth of transformation, in the other-people and other-worlds we inhabit before and after a traumatic event. I am also interested in the very real bodily experience of transformation– through hard physical labor, childbirth, flashes of light. I think of myself as a daughter, a mother, and of our transforming world–on the precipice of climate disaster or in so many ways already falling. It is through poems that I am able to follow questions, pull on threads. What does it mean to inhabit other worlds? To be dropped there against our will or to willingly create them for ourselves. How am I, through my labor, transformed?

Illustrated poem on ceramic tile, "Husqvarna Princess".

Bio

Carolyn Orosz lives and writes in Vermont. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she was managing editor for Devil’s Lake. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and Marble House Project. She is currently a poetry reader for New England Review.

carolynorosz.com