Jamie Cheung

Artist Statement

Food to me is a sensory experience that should invoke play and wonder — it is a medium that can be interactive, spatial, and personal. My practice explores dining as an act of placemaking and collective archive. I strive for my culinary practice to break the boundaries of formality and am committed to creating tablescapes for exchange, conversation, and celebration. My culinary practice feels like an intricately woven tapestry of relationships and experiences that have surrounded me. Despite my Chinese-Canadian upbringing, my palette has been most informed through cohabitation with roommates who were third culture kids as well. While inviting and coexisting in a space filled with individual yet distinct cultural values, sharing meals passed down through generations, and living the way our loved ones have lived has been intrinsic to my overall practice.

Hong Kong Style street food and non-greasy bites in a tablescape for Food Mahjong Club #4 in Chinatown, NY. Photo Credit: David Chow

Bio

Jamie is a multidisciplinary designer from Toronto, Canada who is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. With a background in architecture and a keen visual eye, their medium(s) span across food, drawing, and spatial planning. They began formulating their culinary identity through elaborate dinner parties thrown during architecture school. A themed party series turned zine later informed the name of the collective, "Edible Affairs". These opulent dinners were often spectacles with sculptural, interactive centerpieces, and at the root of it — always community oriented. After venturing to Brooklyn, Jamie continued collaborating with innovative design firms like Food New York to produce abundant tablescapes for their mahjong nights, a club series that received recognition in the New York Times. In the past year, Edible Affairs has produced events with/at/for the Aesop Queer Library, A+A+A, NEW Inc, and CUE Art Foundation.

[edibleaffairs.net]

jamieclcheung.ca

Natalie Cappellini

Artist Statement

As Edible Affairs our practice is rooted in food as a third space. We create sculptural food experiences that are responsive to artistic collaboration, based on whimsy, and rooted in our cultural food traditions (Natalie with California-Argentine roots, and Jamie with Canadian-Chinese roots). Food is a radical method of connection, and we are fueled by nourishing our creative community. We aim to create fluxus style food experiences which emphasize the connection, alchemy, and mess of food. With fine art and applied arts backgrounds, food has become the medium in which we create as it has the utmost ability to elicit pleasure, delight and sensuality. The universality of food is where we place our desires. Food is a constant opportunity for revelation! For celebration! Our collaborations evoke both nostalgia and futurism as food enables us to recreate and reinterpret just as quickly as we digest.

A still from our End of the World party. Including charcoal lava foccacia, and charred corn towers.

Bio

Natalie Cappellini is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her diverse practice spans painting, sculpting, and the culinary arts. Natalie began her culinary journey as an independent child recreating recipes she saw on the food network with frozen food and leftovers in the family fridge. Natalie’s culinary practice is grounded in hospitality, a skill she learned from being the only child at her parents dinner parties. Upon settling in Brooklyn Natalie began Astrology Dinner Party a monthly lavish food affair centering queer community and built upon accessibility and conviviality. The creation of delicious food spectacles has been expanded through collaborating with Jamie Cheung on Edible Affairs which has contributed to events with the Aesop Queer Library, A+A+A, NEW Inc, and CUE Art Foundation.

Tina Lam

Artist Statement

I create sculptures, installations, land-art interventions and performances informed phylosophy, science, and literature. I am interested in the physical and metaphorical entanglements between the human, the beyond-human, and the unknown. I venture into natural environments to hand-mold black aluminum foil onto boulders, branches and root systems, collecting records of the planet’s surface as one would graze a body’s: its skin, folds, wrinkles and arteries, in constant turbulent transformation arising from its pressurized core to its uppermost continental stratas, continually scarred and mending. I further convert my land-art objects by merging them with materials ranging in translucency from paper to steel, imbuing them with silence, solace and strength. Through the slow process of touch, I commune with the physical world and the elementary forces that assail and sculpt the planet, aiming to elicit awe and meditative introspection as a means to reunite with the very same mysterious cosmic forces that shape our humanhood.

Tina Lam. Cosmic Cues: Magnetoscape Cycle 1. Sculptural installation with black alumnium foil, steel wire, Japanese paper, marble. 2024. Gallery dimensions 18.4 x 22.6 x 14.5 feet. Photo Credits Andrew Schwartz.

Bio

I was born in Montréal, Canada, and raised in urban regions by Cambodian-Chinese refugees. Since youth, I have been both fascinated and perplexed by the mysteries of the natural world; I have continued to seek to engage with them methodically through the sciences and somatically through the arts. I am a graduate of Cornell University (MFA), Concordia University (BFA) and McGill University (PhD), and received many grants including from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Council for the Arts. I have attended residencies including Shandaken: Storm King, NARS Foundation, Willapa Bay AIR, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and the Carving Studio & Sculpture Center.

www.tinalamstudio.com

Fernanda DAgostino

Artist Statement

My interest in installation art began during a stay in Italy, where I saw art integrated with landscape, architecture, crafts, and ritual in daily life. For the first time, I understood the connection between “culture” in both its artistic and broader senses. This inspired me to recreate such immersive experiences for my viewers. In addition to sculptural works that anchor my installations, I’ve grown crops for local gleaners, made artist’s books, and constructed interactive spaces—inviting viewers to engage directly with the art. Starting as a craft artist, I still use the tactile qualities of materials to draw people in. For 25 years, I’ve used video projections to animate spaces and sculptures, imbuing them with a sense of memory. Creative coding for interactivity is now a key aspect of my practice, adding a layer of responsiveness to the environments I create.

Fernanda D'Agostino-Chrysalis-Immersive video and sound installation. 2023 Oregon Center for Contemporary Art. 35' x 25' x 22'H -Chrysalis investigates states of becoming and of ending and the mathematical processes that drive change in the natural world. Photo Credit Brian Foulkes

Bio

Fernanda D’Agostino’s internationally exhibited installations incorporate sculpture, architecture, interactive video, projection mapping and sound in novel ways. Her work engages themes of movement and growth as catalyzed by phenomena of the natural world, alchemical transformation, complex networks, and human engagement with non-human communities. Having begun her career in the 1980s as a performance artist with a focus on body work, the body and how it engages with space and objects informs all her work. Although no longer performing every installation includes a performance or other live event and often the making of the work involves performative acts by herself and/or collaborators. She continues to use prompts to initiate her own process and to provoke responses from viewers and collaborators. The connecting thread in all her work is placing viewers at the center of an all-encompassing interactive environment, in this sense the viewer becomes the performer in a “prepared environment.” D’Agostino has received fellowships and grants from the Bronson and Flintridge Foundations, NEA, Precipice Fund, and Ford Family Foundation. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Brooklyn Art Museum, SoundWave Biennial, and Virtual Venice Biennale. Her work is in major collections, including the Houston Museum.

https://fernandadagostino.com

Mollie McKinley

Artist Statement

My work in sculptural photography gives voice to subtle intelligences in nature. By dissolving perceptual boundaries between object and image, the work draws attention to both the tangible and ethereal aspects of the natural world. I’m interested in the shifts in consciousness that happen as one’s body heals from illness; I envision the earth's own healing process in the context of climate change, with an eye towards the strange and surprising. My process begins with exploring wilderness sites and photographing details of wet phenomena with a macro lens. I capture patterns of biofoam that accumulate from turbulent water, algae, jelly fungus, and cavern formations. These gloopy micro-sites are often overlooked as grotesque; I restore their agency and attention. Made into body-scale organic shapes, these sculptural images become portals to otherworldy realms. The work honors non-human intelligence, revering the margins of the natural world.

Fried Chicken Foam Portal Installation 2023 Hand-cut archival inkjet prints on canvas, quilt batting, wooden armature, aircraft cable Left: 35"x50”x2" Right: 40"x60"x2" Installation of two double-sided, hanging photographic sculptures at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY as part of Notes for Tomorrow organized by Independent Curators International and co-curated by Karlyn Benson Photo by Mollie McKinley

Bio

Mollie McKinley is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice forges relationships between photographic image and sculpture, investigating connections between landscape, illness, and consciousness. McKinley’s work has been shown at Fridman Gallery, Turley Gallery, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, NADA, Pioneer Works, UrbanGlass, Independent Curators International, The Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz, The Museum of Arts and Design, Anthology Film Archives, and many others. McKinley holds a BA in photography from Bard College, and an MFA in sculpture/dimensional studies from Alfred University. She has been a recent artist in residence at Light Work, and is a contributor to How-To Kit, published by the Walker Art Center in collaboration with the Dia Art Foundation. McKinley is based in the Hudson Valley of New York.

www.molliemckinley.com

Ana González Barragán

Artist Statement

Ana González Barragán (b. Mexico City, 1989) is an artist and researcher focused on the histories—cultural, geological, and political—of different stones and minerals. Working in obsidian, marble, and other materials with long aesthetic traditions, González Barragán creates sculptural objects and installations that explore and amplify the metaphoric potential of geologic bodies, paying careful attention to their own complex geologic histories, detectable in veins, cracks, and gradations of tone. In her practice, González Barragán also uses time-based media and oral history-taking to register the extractive (and often violent and exploitative) processes long associated with these materials, from the gender politics and labor practices of mining to the ecological impacts of industrial capitalism. This extensive research and documentation is conducted on-site, in locations that include Sierra de las Navajas, Mexico, and Marble, Colorado.

Ana González Barragán_Unearthing_White Yule Marble, Hydraulic Table_2023

Bio

Ana holds a BA in Furniture and Product Design from CENTRO University; among her recent exhibitions are Material Art Fair with Janet40, Mexico (2019); Zona Maco in Sample Booth, Mexico (2019); SWAB Art Fair, Barcelona (2019);  Momoroom (2020); and Salon Cosa (2021). She was recently commissioned a public art installation for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and is now pursuing an MFA in Sculpture and Post-Studio Practice at the University of Colorado Boulder.

anagonzalezbarragan.info

Michael Harrison

Artist Statement

As a composer and pianist my works blend the classical music traditions of Europe and North India, while forging a new approach to composition through just intonation. This ancient form of pure tuning is constructed from musical intervals of perfect mathematical proportions and is considered the universal foundation for harmony. Throughout much of the history of Western classical music, just intonation was subsumed by the convenient and homogenized system of equal temperament and hierarchical staff notation. Just intonation survives today with a cappella music and in Indian ragas, engaging acoustically rich harmonies and nature-based time cycles. I seek expressions of universality via the physics of sound – music that brings one into a state of concentrated listening as a meditative and even mind-altering experience. My ongoing discoveries with just intonation have provided the foundation and inspiration to compose numerous works for re-tuned piano, string instruments, chamber ensembles, vocals, orchestra, and electronics, many of which explore the harmonic colors, special resonances and acoustical effects that are only available in extended just intonation. Just intonation further reveals and maximizes natural resonance and somatic listening, amplifying our beautifully complex acoustic universe. Fascinated by these qualities as well as possible new applications for sound, I often collaborate with filmmakers, visual artists, architects, and choreographers. As the world becomes more complex in this era of social and climatic acceleration, my work aspires to contextualize humans in ever-expanding space and time.

Michael Harrison at The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, 2022; all artworks © The Estate of Walter De Maria

Bio

Composer/pianist Michael Harrison forges a new approach to composition through just intonation (tuning based on perfect harmonic proportions). He is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. Harrison’s recent release Seven Sacred Names reached the top 10 classical albums on Billboard and was called “music of positively intoxicating beauty” in The New Yorker. "Just Constellations," commissioned and recorded by Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, was among NPR's Best 100 Songs of 2020. Time Loops was among NPR's Top 10 Classical Albums of 2012. His work, "Revelation," achieved international recognition and inclusion in the Best Classical Recordings of 2007 selections of The New York Times and Boston Globe. Harrison’s primary teachers are La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Indian vocalists Pandit Pran Nath and Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan. Harrison is on faculty at the Manhattan School of Music where he also received his Masters in Composition. Performances of Harrison’s music include BAM Next Wave Festival, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Park Avenue Armory, United Nations, the Louvre, Pompidou Centre, MASS MoCA, Spoleto, Big Ears, Sundance, Klavier Festival Ruhr, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Minimal Music Festival in Amsterdam, Mattatoio Museum in Rome, DaCamera and The Menil Collection in Houston.

michaelharrison.com

Maho Ogawa

Artist Statement

My multicultural background as a choreographer in NY who grew up in Japan led me to assess movements from the West and East to find my Japaneseness in movement. Currently, I’m researching Japanese Tea Rituals and Zen philosophy through writing (https://www.culturepush.org/push-pull-issue-20) and performance. The Japanese Tea Ritual aims to listen deeply to your own mind and those of your guests, finding relationships of care and paying attention to our environment (including sound, body, and space) through the act of making tea. For my work, I use the body, video, text, and an audience-participatory approach to build new methods of thinking about 'silence,' providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community. At the residency, I'll research the relationship between Zen meditation and body movement. Referring to Zen philosophy, I’ll create a method for experiencing several ways of listening to 'silence' through movement scores.

Maho Ogawa_"s-silence"_performance_2023_premiered at the Mix Festival at Abrons Art Center, NY_

Bio

Maho Ogawa is a Japanese-born multidisciplinary movement artist working in NY. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated body movements, and she has built a database, "Minimum Movement Catalog" (https://minimum-movement-demo.web.app/movements). Her recent works partly decontextualize and research the minimum movement in Japanese tea culture. She crafts public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new thinking methods about "silence." Her aim is to empower erased cultures by dismantling oppressed body gestures and their context as choreography, fighting for cultural equality in nonviolent ways. Maho's works have been shown in Asia at Korea & Japan Dance Festival (Seoul), Za Koenji( Tokyo), Whenever Wherever Festival (Tokyo), and in the U.S. including Princeton University, Invisible Dog Art Center, JACK, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, New York University Grey Gallery, and Emily Harvey Foundation, to name a few. Ogawa received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and creation support at Culture Push, Emily Harvey Foundation, LEIMAY, and New Dance Alliance. She is a 2024-2026 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.

https://www.suisoco.com